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Gy Jrving Babbitt 


DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP. 
ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM, 
THE MASTERS OF MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM. 
THE NEW LAOKOON. 
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts. 
LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN COLLEGE. 
Essays in Defense of the Humanities. 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
BosTON AND NEW YorK 





Pree rALURE AND THE 
AMERICAN COLLEGE 





LITERATURE AND THE 
AMERICAN COLLEGE 


ESSAYS IN DEFENSE OF 
THE HUMANITIES 


BY 


IRVING BABBITT 





BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Che iversive Press Cambridge 


COPYRIGHT 1908 BY IRVING BABBITT 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE 
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM 


The Riverside Press 
CAMBRIDGE » MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


“ There are two laws discrete 
Not reconciled, — 
Law for man, and law for thing ; 
The last builds town and fleet, 
But tt runs wild, 


And doth the man unking.” 
— EMERSON. 


«65709 





PREFACE 


NEARLY half the matter in this volume has been 
printed elsewhere. “The Rational Study of the 
Classics,” “‘ Literature and the College,” and “On 
Being Original’”’ are reproduced with immaterial 
changes from the “ Atlantic Monthly.” Two papers 
in the “ Nation ” are combined with a great deal of 
new material in the essay on “ Literature and the 
Doctor’s Degree.’’ Portions of the essays on “ An- 
cients and Moderns” and “ Academic Leisure” are 
taken from two articles in the “ Harvard Graduates’ 
Magazine.” I wish to thank the publishers of these 
periodicals for permission to reprint. 

I have often been forced in these essays to tread 
on burning ground, at the risk of giving offense 
to some of my readers. I may at least say that my 
aim has been to define types and tendencies, and 
not to satirize or even label individuals. Individuals 
are usually not easy to label, especially at a time 
like the present. A highly unified age may offer 
examples of highly unified personalities ; but there 
is likely to exist in the individual of to-day the same 
confused conflict of tendencies that we see in the 
larger world. What I try to show is, not that our 


[ vii ] 


PREFACE 


contemporary scholars are lacking in humanistic 
traits, but that the scholars in whom these traits 
predominate are few (vart nantes in gurgite vasto). 

I would also remind the reader that my treat- 
ment of certain eminent persons of the past and 
present is limited by my subject, and makes no 
claim to completeness. It was, for example, inev- 
itable in dealing with college education that I 
should discuss the réle of President Eliot. It was 
also inevitable, in the case of one who has exercised 
so many-sided an influence on his time, that I 
should fall very far short of a rounded estimate. 

I desire to take this opportunity of expressing 
my sense of obligation to Professor Charles Eliot 
Norton. Those who during the past generation 
have felt the need of a more humane scholarship 
are indebted to him, many for direct aid and en- 
couragement, and all for an example. To Mr. Paul 
E. More, literary editor of the New York ‘ Even- 
ing Post” and the “ Nation,” who read several of 
these essays in manuscript, acknowledgments are 


due for various criticisms and suggestions. 
| a: 9 8 


HOLDERNESS, N. H., December, 1907. 


VII. 
VIII. 


CONTENTS 


WuHaT 1S HUMANISM? 

Two Types OF HUMANITARIANS: BACON 
AND ROUSSEAU 

THE COLLEGE AND THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 

LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 

LITERATURE AND THE DocTor’s DEGREE 

THE RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 

ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 

ON BEING ORIGINAL 

ACADEMIC LEISURE 


118 
150 
181 
215 
246 





LITERATURE AND THE 
AMERICAN COLLEGE 


I 
WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


One of our federal judges said, not long ago, that 
what the American people need is ten per cent of 
thought and ninety per cent of action. In that 
case we ought all to be happy, for that is about 
what we have already. One is reminded by con- 
trast of an accusation brought by a recent his- 
torian of Greek philosophy against Socrates, who, 
according to this historian, exaggerates the reason- 
ableness of human nature. Only think rightly, 
Socrates seems to say, and right acting may be 
counted on to follow. The English and American 
temper is in this respect almost the reverse of 
Socratic. Act strenuously, would appear to be our 
faith, and right thinking will take care of itself. 
We feel that we can afford to “ muddle along”’ in 
theory if only we attain to practical efficiency. 
This comparative indifference to clearness and 


[1] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


consistency of thought is visible even in that chief 
object of our national concern, education. The firm- 
ness of the American’s faith in the blessings of 
education is equaled only by the vagueness of his 
ideas as to the kind of education to which these 
blessings are annexed. One can scarcely consider 
the tremendous stir we have been making for the 
past thirty years or more about education, the 
time and energy and enthusiasm we are ready to 
lavish on educational undertakings, the libraries 
and laboratories and endowments, without being 
reminded of the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds : 
“A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of in- 
finite inquiry and research, may be employed to 
evade and shuffle off real labor —the real labor of 
thinking.” We live so fast, as the saying is, that 
we have no time to think. The task of organizing 
and operating a huge and complex educational ma- 
chinery has left us scant leisure for calm reflec- 
tion. Evidently a little less eagerness for action 
and a little more of the Socratic spirit would do 
no harm. We are likely, however, to be arrested 
at the very outset of any attempt to clarify our 
notions about education, as Socrates was in dealing 


[2] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


with the problems of his own time, by the need 
of accurate definition. The Socratic method is, in- 
deed, in its very essence a process of right defining. 
It divides and subdivides and distinguishes between 
the diverse and sometimes contradictory concepts 
that lurk beneath one word; it is a perpetual pro- 
test, in short, against the confusion that arises from 
the careless use of general terms, especially when 
they have become popular catchwords. If Socrates 
were here to-day, we can picture to ourselves how 
he would go around ‘cross-examining ”’ those of us 
(there are some college presidents in the number) 
who repeat so glibly the current platitudes about 
liberty and progress, democracy, service, and the 
like ; and he would no doubt get himself set down 
as a public nuisance for his pains, as he was by his 
fellow Athenians. 

A good example of the confusion arising from 
general terms is the term that is more important 
than any other, perhaps, for our present argument. 
To make a plea for humanism without explaining 
the word would give rise to endless misunder- 
standing. It is equally on the lips of the social- 
istic dreamer and the exponent of the latest philo- 


[3] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


sophical fad. In an age of happy liberty like the 
present, when any one can employ almost any gen- 
eral term very much as he pleases, it is perhaps 
inevitable that the term humanism, which still has 
certain gracious associations lingering about it, 
should be appropriated by various theorists, in the 
hope, apparently, that the benefit of the associa- 
tions may accrue to an entirely different order of 
ideas. Thus the Oxford philosopher, Mr. F. C. S. 
Schiller, claims to be a humanist, and in the name 
of humanism threatens to “do strange deeds upon 
the clouds.’ Renan says that the religion of the 


” 


future will be a “true humanism.” The utopists 


who have described their vision of the future as 


’ 


“humanism” or the “new humanism” are too 
numerous to mention. Gladstone speaks of the 
humanism of Auguste Comte, Professor Herford 
of the humanism of Rousseau, and the Germans in 
general of the humanism of Herder ; whereas Comte, 
Rousseau, and Herder were all three not humanists, 
but humanitarian enthusiasts. A prominent period- 
ical, on the other hand, laments the decay of the 
“humanitarian spirit” at Harvard, meaning no 


doubt humanistic. We evidently need a working 


[4] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


definition not only of humanism, but of the words 
with which it is related or confused, — humane, 
humanistic, humanitarian, humanitarianism. And 
these words, if successfully defined, will help us to 
a further necessary definition, — that of the college. 
For any discussion of the place of literature in the 
college is conditioned by a previous question: 
whether there will be any college for literature to 
have a place in. The college has been brought to 
this predicament not so much perhaps by its avowed 
enemies as by those who profess to be its friends. 
Under these circumstances our prayer, like that of 
Ajax, should be to fight in the light. 


I 


The first step in our quest would seem to be to 
go back to the Latin words (Aumanus, humanitas) 
from which all the words of our group are derived. 
Most of the material we need will be found in a 
recent and excellent study by M. Gaston Boissier of 
the ancient meanings of Aumanitas. From M. Bois- 
sier’s paper it would appear that Zwmanztas was from 
the start a fairly elastic virtue with the Romans, 
and that the word came to be used rather loosely, 


[5] 


i 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


so that ina late Latin writer, Aulus Gellius, we find 
a complaint that it had been turned aside from its 
true meaning. Humanitas, says Gellius, is incor- 
rectly used to denote a “ promiscuous benevolence, 
what the Greeks call philanthropy,” whereas the 
word really implies doctrine and discipline, and is 
applicable not to men in general but only to a se- 
lect few, —it is, in short, aristocratic and not demo- 
cratic in its implication.* 

The confusion that Gellius complains of is not 
only interesting in itself, but closely akin to one 
that we need to be on guard against to-day. If we 
are to believe Gellius, the Roman decadence was 
like our own age in that it tended to make love for 
one’s fellow men, or altruism, as we call it, do duty 
for most of the other virtues. It confused human- 
ism with philanthropy. Only our philanthropy has 
been profoundly modified, as we shall see more fully 
later, by becoming associated with an idea of which 


only the barest beginnings can be found in anti- 


quity — the idea of progress. 
It was some inkling of the difference between a 
universal philanthropy and the indoctrinating and 


t See Woctes Attica, xiii, 17. 


[6] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


disciplining of the individual that led Aulus Gellius 
to make his protest. Two words were probably 
needed in his time; they are certainly needed to- 


day. A person who has sympathy for mankind in © 


the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to 
serve the great cause of this progress, should be 
called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his 
creed may be designated as humanitarianism. From 
the present tendency to regard humanism as an ab- 
breviated and convenient form for humanitarianism 
there must arise every manner of confusion. The 
humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth 
of knowledge and sympathy. The poet Schiller, for 
instance, speaks as a humanitarian and not as a 
humanist when he would “clasp the millions to his 
bosom,” and bestow “a kiss upon the whole world.” 
The humanist is more selective in his caresses: 
Aulus Gellius, who was a man of somewhat crabbed 
and pedantic temper, would apparently exclude sym- 
pathy almost entirely from his conception of huwman- 
ztas and confine the meaning to what he calls cura 
et disciplina; and he cites the authority of Cicero. 
Cicero, however, seems to have avoided any such 
one-sided view. Like the admirable humanist that 


[7] 


, fr & 
ty) 
Ld a 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


he was, he no doubt knew that what is wanted is 
not sympathy alone, nor again discipline and selec- 
tion alone, but a Uisciplined and we sympathy. 
Sympathy without selection becomes flabby, and a 
selection which is unsympathetic tends to grow dis- 
dainful. 

The humanist, then, as opposed to the humani- 
tarian, is interested in the perfecting of the indi- 
vidual rather than in schemes for the elevation of g 
mankind _as a whole; and although he allows largely 
for sympathy, he insists that it be disciplined ar 1 
tempered by judgment. One of the most recent 
attempts to define humanism, that of Bruneticre,* 
who was supposed to be out of touch with his own 
time, suffers, nevertheless, from our present failure 
to see in the term anything more than the fullness 
of knowledge and sympathy. Brunetiére thinks he 
has discovered a complete definition of humanism in 
the celebrated line of Terence: “ Humani nihil a 


” 


me alienum puto,’”’ This line expresses very well 
a universal concern for one’s fellow creatures, but 
fails to define the humanist because of the entire 
absence of the idea of selection. It is spoken in 


' Histoire de la Littérature francaise classique, t. i, p. 28. 


[8] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


the play as an excuse for meddling; and might 
serve appropriately enough as a motto for the hu- 
manitarian busybody with whom we are all so 
familiar nowadays, who goes around with schemes 
for reforming almost everything — except him.” 
self. As applied to literature the line might be 
cited as a justification for reading anything, from 
Plato to the Sunday supplement. Cosmopolitan 
breadth of knowledge and sympathy do not by 
themselves suffice; to be humanized these quali- 
ties need to be tempered by discipline and selec- 
tion. From this point of view the Latin /:ttere 
humaniores is a happier phrase than our English 
“humane letters,” because of the greater em- 
phasis the Latin comparative puts on the need of 
selection. 

The true humanist maintains a just balance be- 
tween sympathy and selection. We moderns, even 
a champion of the past like Bruneticre, tend to lay 
an undue stress on the element of sympathy. On 
the other hand, the ancients in general, both Greek 
and Roman, inclined to sacrifice sympathy to selec- 
tion. Gellius’s protest against confusing humantitas 


with a promiscuous philanthropy instead of reserv- 


[9] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ing it for doctrine and discipline would by itself 
be entirely misleading. Ancient humanism is as a 
whole intensely aristocratic in temper; its sympa- 
thies run in what would seem to us narrow chan- 
nels; it is naturally disdainful of the humble and 
lowly who have not been indoctrinated and disci- 
plined. Indeed, an unselective and universal sympa- 
thy, the sense of the brotherhood of man, as we 
term it, is usually supposed to have come into the 
world only with Christianity. We may go farther 
and say that the exaltation of love and sympathy 
as supreme and all-sufficing principles that do not 
need to be supplemented by doctrine and discipline 
is largely peculiar to our modern or. humanitarian 
era. Historically, Christians have always inclined 
to reserve their sympathies for those who had the 
same doctrine and discipline as themselves, and only 
too often have joined to a sympathy for their own 
kind a fanatical hatred for everybody else. One 
whole side of Christianity has put a tremendous 
emphasis on selection — even to the point of con- 
ceiving of God Himself as selective rather than 
sympathetic (“Many are called, few are chosen,” 
etc.). We may be sure that stalwart believers like 


[10] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


St. Paul or St. Augustine or Pascal would look 
upon our modern humanitarians with their talk of 
social problems and their tendency to reduce reli- 
gion to a phase of the tenement-house question as 
weaklings and degenerates. Humanitarianism, how- 
ever, and the place it accords to sympathy is so im- 
portant for our subject that we shall have to revert 
to it later. For the present it is enough to oppose 
the democratic inclusiveness of our modern sympa- 
thies to the aristocratic aloofness of the ancient 
humanist and his disdain of the profane vulgar 
(Odi profanum vulgus et arceo). This aloofness and 
disdain are reflected and in some ways intensified 
in the humanism of the Renaissance. The man of 
the Renaissance felt himself doubly set above the 
“raskall many,” first by his doctrine and discipline / 
and then by the learned medium through which 
the doctrine and discipline were conveyed. The 
echo of this haughty humanism is heard in the 
lines of Milton : — 


“ Nor do I name of men the common rout, 
That wandering loose about, 
Grow up and perish as the summer fly, 


Heads without name, no more rememberéd.” 


[11] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Later on this humanistic ideal became more and 
more conventionalized and associated with a hier- 
archy of rank and privilege. The sense of intel- 

y lectual superiority was reinforced by the sense of 

/ social superiority. The consequent narrowing of 
sympathy is what Amiel objects to in the English 
gentleman: “Between gentlemen, courtesy, equal- 
ity, social proprieties ; below that level, haughtiness, 
disdain, coldness, indifference. . . . The politeness of 
a gentleman is not human and general, but quite 
individual and personal.” It is a pity, no doubt, 
that the Englishman is thus narrow in his sym- 
pathies; but it will be a greater pity, if, in en- 
larging his sympathies, he allows his traditional 
disciplines, humanistic and religious, to be relaxed 
and enervated. The English humanist is not 
entirely untrue to his ancient prototype even in 
the faults of which Amiel complains. There is a 
real relation, as Professor Butcher points out, — 
between the English idea of the gentleman and 
scholar and the view of the cultivated man that 
was once held in the intensely aristocratic demo- 
cracy of Athens. 


[12] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


II 


We should of course remember that though we 
have been talking of ancient humanism and human- 
ists, the word humanist was not used until the Re- 
naissance and the word humanism not until a still 
later period. In studying the humanism of the 
Renaissance the significant contrast that we need 
to note is the one commonly made at this time 
between humanity and divinity.” In its essence 
the Renaissance is a protest against the time when 
there was too much divinity and not enough human- 
ity, against the starving and stunting of certain 
sides of man by medieval theology, against a vision 
of the supernatural that imposed a mortal constraint 
upon his more purely human and natural faculties. 
The models of a full and free play of these facul- 
ties were sought in the ancient classics, but the 
cult of the ancients soon became itself a supersti- 
tion, so that a man was called a humanist from the 
mere fact of having received an initiation into 
the ancient languages, even though he had little or 
nothing of the doctrine and discipline that the term 
shouldimply. Very few of the early Italian human- 


[13 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ists were really humane. For many of them human- 
ism, so far from being a doctrine and discipline, 
was a revolt from all discipline, a wild rebound 
from the medizval extreme into an opposite ex- 
cess. What predominates in the first part of the 
Renaissance is a movement of emancipation — 
emancipation of the senses, of the intellect, and 
in the northern countries of the conscience. It 
was the first great modern era of expansion, the 
first forward push of individualism. As in all such 
periods, the chief stress is on the broadening 
of knowledge, and, so far as was compatible 
with the humanistic exclusiveness, of sympathy. 
The men of that time had what Emerson calls 
a canine appetite for knowledge. The ardor 
with which they broke away from the bonds and 
Jeading-strings of medizeval tradition, the exuber- 
ance with which they celebrated the healing of the 
long feud between nature and human nature, ob- 
scured for a time the need of decorum and selection. 
A writer like Rabelais, for instance, is neither deco- 
rous nor select ; and so in spite of his great genius 


would probably have seemed to a cultivated ancient 


barbaric rather than humane. Such a disorderly 


[14] 


( 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


and undisciplined unfolding of the faculties of the 
individual, such an over-emphasis on the benefits of 
liberty as compared with the benefits of restraint, 
brought in its train the evils that are peculiar to 
periods of expansion. There was an increase in 
anarchical self-assertion and self-indulgence that 
seemed a menace to the very existence of society ; 
and so society reacted against the individual and an 
era of expansion was followed by an era of concen- 
tration. This change took place at different times, 
and under different circumstances, in different 
countries. In Italy the change coincides roughly 
with the sack of Rome (1527) and the Council of 
Trent; in France it follows the frightful anarchy 
of the wars of religion and finds political expression 
in Henry IV, and literary expression in Malherbe. 
Of course in so complex a period as the Renaissance 
we must allow for innumerable eddies and cross- 
currents and for almost any number of individual 
exceptions. In an age as well as in an individual 
there are generally elements, often important ele- 
ments, that run counter to the main tendency. But 
if one is not a German doctor who has to prove his 


“originality,” or a lover of paradox for its own sake, 


[15] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


it is usually possible to discern the main drift in 
spite of the eddies and counter-currents. 

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the 
later Renaissance was away from a humanism that 
favored a free expansion toward a humanisn that 
was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective. 
The whole movement was complicated by what is 
at bottom a different problem, the need that was 
felt in France and Italy, at least, of protecting 
society against the individual. One can insist on 
selection and discipline without at the same time 
being so distrustful of individualism. Many of the 
humanists of this period fell into hardness and nar- 
rowness (in other words, ceased to be humane) 
from over-emphasis on a discipline that was to be 
imposed from without and from above, and on a 
doctrine that was to be codified in a multitude of 
minute prescriptions. The essence of art, accord- 
ing to that highly astringent genius, Scaliger, who 
had a European influence on the literary criticism 
of this age, is electzo et fastidium suz— selection 
and fastidiousness toward one’s self (in practice 
Scaliger reserved his fastidiousness for other peo- 
ple). This spirit of fastidious selection gained 


[16 ] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


ground until instead of the expansive Rabelais we 
have the exclusive Malherbe, until a purism grew 
up that threatened to impoverish men’s ideas and 
emotions as well as their vocabulary. Castiglione 
had said in his treatise on the Courtier that there 
should enter into the make-up of the gentleman an 
element of aloofness and disdain (sprezzatura), a 
saying that, properly interpreted, contains a pro- 
found truth. Unfortunately, aristocratic aloofness, 
coupled with fastidious selection and unleavened 
by broad and sympathetic knowledge, leads straight 
to the attitude that Voltaire has hit off in his 
sketch of the noble Venetian lord Pococurante, — 
to the type of scholar who would be esteemed, not 
like the man of to-day by the inclusiveness of his 
sympathies, but by the number of things he had 
rejected. Pococurante had cultivated sprezzatura 
with a vengeance, and rejected almost everything 
except a few verses of Virgil and Horace. “ What 
a great man is this Pococurante!” says the awe- 
stricken Candide; ‘ nothing can please him.” 

The contrast between the disciplinary and select- 
ive humanism of the later Renaissance and the ear- 


lier period of expansion should not blind us to the 


haya) 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


underlying unity of aim. Like the ancient human- 
ists whom they took as their guides, the men of 
both periods aimed at forming the complete man 
(totus, teres atque rotundus). But the men of the 
later period and the neo-classicists in general hoped 
to attain this completeness not so much by the 
virtues of expansion as by the virtues of concentra- 
tion. It seemed to them that the men of the earlier 
period had left too much opening for the whims 
and vagaries of the individual; and so they were 
chiefly concerned with making a selection of sub- 
jects and establishing a doctrine and discipline that 
should be universal and human. To this end the 
classical doctrine and discipline were to be put into 
the service of the doctrine and discipline of Christ- 
ilanity. This attempt at a compromise between the 
pagan and Christian traditions is visible both in 
Catholic countries in the Jesuit schools, and in 
Protestant countries in the selection of studies that 
took shape in the old college curriculum. No doubt 
the selection of both divinity and humanity that 
was intended to be representative was inadequate ; 
and no doubt the whole compromise between doc- 
trines and disciplines, that were in many respects 


[ 18 ] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


divergent and in some respects hostile, laid itself 
open to the charge of being superficial. The men 
of the early Renaissance had felt more acutely the 
antagonism between divinity as then understood 
and humanity, and had often taken sides uncom- 
promisingly for one or for the other. Machiavelli 
accused Christianity of having made the world 
effeminate, whereas Luther looked on the study of 
the pagan classics, except within the narrowest 
bounds, as pernicious. Calvin execrated Rabelais, 
and Rabelais denounced Calvin as an impostor. 
Yet, after all, the effort to make the ancient hu- 
manities and arts of expression tributary to Christ- 
ianity was in many respects admirable, and the 
motto that summed it up, sapiens atque eloquens 
pietas, might still, if properly interpreted, be used 
to define the purpose of the college. 

A desideratum of scholarship at present is a study 
of the way certain subjects came to be selected as 
representative and united into one discipline with 
elements that were drawn from religion; we 
need, in short, a more careful history than has 
yet been written of the old college curriculum. 
Closely connected with this and equally needful is 


[19] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


a history of the development of the gentleman, going 
back to the work of Castiglione and other Italian 
treatises on manners in the sixteenth century, and 
making clear especially how the conception of the 
gentleman came to unite with that of the scholar 
so as to form.an ideal of which something still sur- 
vives in England. A Castiglione in Italy and a Sir 
Philip Sidney in England already realize the ideal 
of the gentleman and scholar, and that with the 
splendid vitality of the Renaissance. But a Scaliger, 
for all his fastidious selection, remains a colossal 
pedant. In general, it is only under French influence 
that scholarship gets itself disengaged from pedan- 
try and acquires urbanity and polish, that the stand- 
ards of the humanist coalesce with those of the 
man of the world. But it is likewise under French 
influence that the ideal of the gentleman and scholar 
is externalized and conventionalized, until in some 
of the later neo-classic Pococurantes it has degen- 
erated into a mixture of snobbishness and superfi- 
ciality, until what had once been a profound insight 
becomes a mere polite prejudice. We must not, 
however, be like the leaders of the great romantic 
revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk 


[ 20 ] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


of convention, disregarded also the humane aspira- 
tion. Even in his worst artificiality, the neo-clas- 
sicist is still related to the ancient humanist by his 
horror of one-sidedness, of all that tends to the 
atrophy of certain faculties and the hypertrophy of 
others, by his avoidance of everything that is ex- 
cessive and over-emphatic; and, inasmuch as it is 
hard to be an enthusiast and at the same time mod- 
erate, by his distrust of enthusiasm. He cultivates 
detachment and freedom from affectation (sprezza- 
tura) and wonders at nothing (22/ admzrart) ; whereas 
the romanticist, as all the world knows, is prone to 
wonder at everything —especially at himself and 
his own genius. In his appearance and behavior, 
the neo-classicist would be true to the general traits 
of human nature, and is even careful to avoid tech- 
nical and professional terms in his writing and con- 
versation. “Perfected good-breeding,”’ says Dr. John- 
son, “consists in having no particular mark of -any 
profession, but a general elegance of manners.” (A 
standard that Dr. Johnson himself did not entirely 
attain.) At the bottom of the whole point of view 
is the fear of specialization. “The true gentleman 


and scholar” (ounéte homme), says La Rochefou- 


[21] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


cauld, “is he who does not pride himself on any- 
thing.”” We may contrast this with a maxim that is 
sometimes heard in the American business world: 
A man who knows two things is damned. In other 
words, the man of that time would rather have been 
thought superficial than one-sided, the man of to- 
day would rather be thought one-sided than super- 
ficial. 
III 

We may perhaps venture to sum up the results 
of our search for a definition of humanism. We 
_have seen that the humanist, as we know him his- 
and an extreme of disci caine and selection, and be- 
came humane in proportion as he mediated between 
these extremes. To state this truth more generally, 
the true mark of excellence in a man, as Pascal 
puts it, is his power to harmonize in-himself Oppo- 
site virtues and to occupy all the space between 
them | (tout Lentredeur). By “his ability thus to 
unite in himself opposite qualities man shows his 
humanity, his superiority of essence over other 
animals. Thus Saint Francois de Sales, we are 
told, united in himself the qualities of the eagle 


ea 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


and the dove —he was an eagle of gentleness. 
The historian of Greek philosophy we have already 
quoted remarks on the perfect harmony that Socra- 
tes had attained between thought and feeling. If 
we compare Socrates in this respect with Rousseau, 
who said that “his heart and his head did not seem 
to belong to the same individual,” we shall per- 
ceive the difference between a sage and a sophist. 
Man is a creature who is foredoomed to one-sided- 
ness, yet who becomes humane only in proportion 
as he triumphs over this fatality of his nature, 
only as he arrives at that measure which comes 
from tempering his virtues, each by its opposite. 
The aim, as Matthew Arnold has said in the 
most admirable of his critical phrases, is to see life 
steadily and see it whole; but this is an aim, alas, 
that no one has ever attained completely — not 
even Sophocles, to whom Arnold applies it. After 
man has made the simpler adjustments, there are 
other and more difficult adjustments awaiting him 
beyond, and the goal is, in a sense, infinitely remote. 

For most practical purposes, the law of measure 
is the supreme law of life, because it pode and 
includes all other laws. It was doubtless the per- 


[ 23 ] 


% 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ception of this fact that led the most eminent 
personality of the Far East, Gotama Buddha, to 
proclaim in the opening sentence of his first ser- 
mon that extremes are barbarous. But India as 
a whole failed to learn the lesson. Greece is 
perhaps the most humane of countries, because 
it not only formulated clearly the law of measure 


‘nothing too much”), but also perceived the 


avenging nemesis that overtakes every form of 
insolent excess (vprs) or violation of this law. 

Of course, even in Greece any effective insight 
into the law of measure was confined to a minority, 
though at times a large minority. The majority at any 
particular instant in Greece or elsewhere is almost 


sure to be unsound, and unsound because it is one- 


sided. We may borrow a homely illustration from 
the theory of commercial crises. A minority of men 
may be prudent and temper their enterprise with 
discretion, but the majority is sure to over-trade, 
and so unless restrained by the prudent few will 
finally bring on themselves the nemesis of a panic. 
The excess from which Greek civilization suffered 
should be of special interest, because it is plain that 
so humane a people could not have failed to make 


[ 24 ] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


any of the ordinary adjustments. Without attempt- 
ing to treat fully so difficult a topic, we may say 
that Greece, having lost its traditional standards 
through the growth of intellectual skepticism, fell 
into a dangerous and excessive mobility of mind 
because of its failure to develop new standards that 
would unify its life and impose a discipline upon 
the individual. It failed, in short, to mediate be- 
tween unity and diversity, or, as the philosophers 
express it, between the absolute and the relative. 
The wisest Greek thinkers, notably Socrates and 
Plato, saw the problem and sought a solution; but 
by putting Socrates to death Athens made plain 
that it was unable to distinguish between its sages 

and its sophists. 
‘There is the One, says Plato, and there is the 
Many. “Show me the man who can combine the 
One with the Many and I will follow in his foot- 
steps, even as in those of a God.”’? To harmonize 

' Phedrus, 266 B. The Greeks in general did not associate 
the law of measure with the problem of the One and the Many. 
Aristotle, who was in this respect a more representative Greek 
than Plato, can scarcely be said to have connected his theory 


of the contemplative life or attainment to a sense of the divine 


unity, with his theory of virtue as a mediating between extremes. 


[25] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult 
adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so 
important, withal, that nations have perished from 
their failure to achieve it. Ancient India was de- 
voured by a too overpowering sense of the One. 
The failure of Greece, on the other hand, to attain 
to this restraining sense of unity led at last to 
the pernicious pliancy of the “hungry Greekling,” 
whose picture Juvenal has drawn. 

The present time in its loss of traditional stand- 


a 
a 


ards is not without analogy to the Athens of the 
Pune and so it is not surprising, perhaps, 
that we should see a refurbishing of the old sophis- 
tries. The so-called humanism of a writer like Mr. 
F.C. S. Schiller has in it something of the intel- 
lectual impressionism of a Protagoras.’ Like the 
ancient sophist, the pragmatist would forego the 


discipline of a central standard, and make of the in- 


? Mr. Schiller himself points out this connection (see Human- 
tsm, p. xvii). As will appear mene from a later Pata, (pp. 82 ff. ) 
ence and practical ou pat for vee failure, because of an | in- 
sufficient feeling for the One, to arrive at real criteria for testing 
experience and discriminating between judgments and mere pass- 


ing impressions. 


[ 26 ] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


dividual man and his thoughts and feelings the 
measure of all things. ‘Why may not the advancing 
front of experience,’’ says Professor James, “ carry- 
ing its imminent satisfaction and dissatisfaction, cut 
against the black inane, as the luminous orb of the 
moon cuts against the black abyss?’’* But the sun 
and moon and stars have their preordained courses, 
and do not dare, as the old Pythagoreans said, to 
transgress their numbers. To make Professor 
James’s metaphor just, the moon would need to 
deny its allegiance to the central unity, and wander 
off by itself on an impressionistic journey of explora- 
tion through space. It is doubtless better to be a 
pragmatist than to devote one’s self to embracing 
the cloud Junos of Hegelian metaphysics. But that 
persons who have developed such an extreme sense 
of the otherwiseness of things as Professor James 
and his school should be called humanists — this 
we may seriously doubt. There would seem to be 
nothing less humane — or humanistic — than plu- 
ralism pushed to this excess, unless it be monism 
pushed to a similar extremity. 

The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must 


Humanism and Truth, p. 16. 


[27] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


maintain the nicest balance between unity and plu- 
rality. There are moments when it should have 
the sense of communion with absolute being, and of 
the obligation to higher standards that this insight 
brings; other moments when it should see itself as 
but a passing phase of the everlasting flux and re- 
lativity of nature; moments when, with Emerson, 
it should feel itself “alone with the gods alone;’’ 
and moments when, with Sainte-Beuve, it should 
look upon itself as only the “most fugitive of illu- 
sions in the bosom of the infinite illusion.” If 
man’s nobility lies in his kinship to the One, he is 
at the same time a phenomenon among other phe- 
nomena, and only at his risk and peril neglects his 
phenomenal self. The humane poise of his facul- 
ties suffers equally from an excess of naturalism 
and an excess of supernaturalism. We have seen 
how the Renaissance protested against the super- 
naturalist excess of the Middle Ages, against a one- 
sidedness that widened unduly the gap between na- 
ture and human nature. Since that time the world 
has been tending to the opposite extreme; not con- 
tent with establishing a better harmony between 
nature and human nature, it would close up the 


[ 28 ] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


gap entirely. Man, according to the celebrated 
dictum of Spinoza, is not in nature as one empire in 
another empire, but as a part ina whole. Impor- 
tant faculties that the supernaturalist allowed to 
decay the naturalist has cultivated, but other facul- 
‘ties, especially those relating to the contemplative 
life, are becoming atrophied through long disuse. 
Man has gained immensely in his grasp on facts, 
but in the meanwhile has become so immersed in 
their multiplicity as to lose that vision of the One 
by which his lower self was once overawed and re- 
strained. ‘ There are two laws discrete,” as Emer- 
son says in his memorable lines ; and since we can- 
not reconcile the “ Law for man” and the “ Law 
for thing,” he would have us preserve our sense of 
each separately, and maintain a sort of ‘double 
consciousness,” a “ public” and a “ private ” nature ; 
and he adds in a curious image that a man must 
ride alternately on the horses of these two natures, 
‘as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves 
nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on 
the back of one and the other foot on the back of 
the other.’ 

There is, perhaps, too much of this spiritual cir- 


[ 29 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


cus-riding in Emerson. Unity and plurality appear 
too often in his work, not as reconciled opposites, 
but as clashing antinomies. He is too satisfied 
with saying about half the time that everything is 
like everything else, and the rest of the time that 
everything is different from everything else. And 
so his genius has elevation and serenity, indeed, 
but at the same time a disquieting vagueness and 
lack of grip in dealing with particulars. Yet Em- 
erson remains an important witness to certain truths 
of the spirit in an age of scientific materialism. 
His judgment of his own time is likely to be defini- 
tive : — 
“ Things are in the saddle 


And ride mankind.” 


Man himself and the products of his spirit, language, 
and literature, are treated not as having a law of 
their own, but as things; as entirely subject to the 
same methods that have won for science such tri- 
umphs over phenomenal nature. The president of 
a congress of anthropologists recently chose as a 
motto for his annual address the humanistic maxim : 


’ 


“The proper study of mankind is man;” and no 


one, probably, was conscious of any incongruity. 


[30] 


WHAT IS HUMANISM? 


At this rate, we may soon see set up as a type of 
the true humanist the Chicago professor who re- 
cently spent a year in collecting cats’-cradles on the 
Congo. 

The humanities need to be defended to-day 
against the encroachments of physical science, as 
they once needed to be against the encroachments 
of theology. But first we must keep a promise 
already made, and in the following essay try to trace 
from its origins that great naturalistic and humani- 
tarian movement which is not only taking the place 
of the humanistic point of view, but actually ren- 
dering it unintelligible for the men of the present 
generation. 


II 


TWO TYPES OF HUMANITARIANS 
BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


AccoRDING to Renan, the capital event of modern 
thought is the substitution in the sixteenth century 
of the Copernican astronomy for the old anthropo- 
centric view. With the advent of the new astro- 
nomy, man, we are told, first had the sensation of the 
infinite ; it would be less misleading to say that he 
then had forced upon him as never before the sense 
of physical immensity. It is this shuddering sense 
of physical immensity that one finds in Pascal, for 
example, and which one would seek in vain in a 
medizeval writer like Dante. Instead of looking on 
the world as the centre of the universe and himself 
as the centre of the world, man was turned adrift, 
as it were, in the infinitude of space. Thus swal- 
lowed up in vastness, he found it increasingly diffi- 
cult to assert his own superiority of essence; he 
regarded himself more and more, not as an empire 
in another empire, but as a part in a whole. This 
new feeling of the oneness of nature and human 


(‘324 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


nature brought its own consolations to man for his 
loss of supernatural privilege. On the sentimental 
side man was consoled by the boons that, accord- 
ing to Wordsworth, spring from a “ wise passive- 


3: 


ness ;”’ on the scientific side by the prospect of 
the dominion that, according to Bacon, he is to 
win over nature by the very act of obeying her. 
Naturalists then have evidently been divided into 
two great classes, according as the predominant tem- 
per has been sentimental or scientific, and corre- 
sponding closely to the two classes of naturalists 
have been the scientific and sentimental humanita- 
rians. The positivist and utilitarian movements, we 
should add, have been inspired mainly by scientific 
humanitarianism, and sentimental naturalism again 
has been an important element, if not the most im- 
portant element, in the so-called romantic move- 
ment. We have not space to discuss fully why the 
various forms of naturalism and humanitarianism 
have been so closely associated in modern thought. 
It is evident, however, that the vitally important 
element in this association has been the idea of 
progress. The Greeks and Romans studied nature 
scientifically, and to some extent communed senti- 


[33] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


mentally with nature. Humanism and naturalism 
coexisted in the men of classical antiquity, as 
well as in the men of the Renaissance, and often 
passed over into one another by almost insensible 
gradations. But only in comparatively recent times 
have the conquests of science become so pro- 
nounced as to raise the hope of a general and sys- 
tematic advance of the human race. The old phil- 
anthropy, as we have said, has been profoundly 
modified and converted into humanitarianism by 
being more closely connected with this idea of pro- 
gress; and the idea of progress in turn rests mainly 
on a belief in the benefits that are to come to man- 
kind in the mass as the result of a closer codperation 
with nature. The réle of science in the new con- 
ception has evidently been greater than the rédle of 
sentiment. Men have always dreamed of the Golden 
Age, but it is only with the triumphs of modern 
science that they have begun to put the Golden 
Age in the future instead of in the past. The great 
line that separates the new era from the old is, as 
Renan remarks, the idea of humanity and the cult 
of its collective achievements. With the decay of 
the traditional faith this cult of humanity is coming 


[34] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


more and more to be our real religion. We would 
all like to be Abou ben Adhems (whose tribe as 
increased), and are, indeed, almost incapable of 
conceiving of the love of God as something apart 
from the love of man. The new religion threatens 
even to impair that historical sense which is the 
special boast of the nineteenth century. Our mod- 
ern believers in progress view the past as compla- 
cently from their own special angle as did the man 
of the Middle Ages when he imagined nunneries 
and cathedrals in ancient Troy. 

Possibly our definitions of sentimental and sci- 
entific humanitarianism may be made still clearer if 
we remove them from the cloud-land of abstraction 
and make them concrete and historical; and per- 
haps this may best be done by picking out for each 
point of view some individual who not only held it 
but actually illustrated its workings in his life and 
character. We already have in the sixteenth cen- 
tury a perfect example of the scientific naturalist and 
humanitarian, in Bacon. For sentimental naturalism, 
on the other hand, we have to wait until the eight- 
eenth century, when it is embodied with extraordi- 


nary completeness in the personality and writings of 


[35] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Rousseau. Bacon and Rousseau represent between 
them the main tendencies that are at present disin- 
tegrating the traditional disciplines, whether human- 
istic or religious. When in the following pages we 
speak of any one as a Baconian or a Rousseauist, we 
do not mean to assert in all cases a direct or even 
an indirect influence, but merely that these men are 
prefigured if not actually anticipated in their out- 
look on life by either Bacon or Rousseau. Thus 
the direct or indirect obligations of Wordsworth to 
Rousseau are not always easy to determine, but no 
careful student can fail to see that the sentimental 
naturalism of Wordsworth, all that element in his 
work by which he is an innovator in English poetry, 
is either latent or more often fully expressed in the 
earlier naturalism of Rousseau. 

The direct and demonstrable influence of Rous- 
seau is, however, enormous; his influence so far 
transcends that of the mere man of letters as to put 
him almost on a level with the founders of religions. 
In his recent lectures on Rousseau, M. Jules Le- 
maitre declared that he was filled with a ‘sacred 
horror” (horreur sacrée) at the magnitude of this 


influence ; and the fashionable and reactionary ele- 
[36] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


ments of Parisian society applauded. Thereupon 
the friends of Rousseau organized a counter-demon- 
stration in the main hall of the Sorbonne, with 
thousands present and thousands more turned away, 
with a white heat of excitement and the kind of 
speeches that in this country we should associate 
with a great political convention. We may smile 
at these characteristically French proceedings, but 
at bottom the French are right in perceiving how 
much in modern life is involved in one’s attitude 
toward Rousseau; they are right in centering their 
attack and defense on the great father of radicalism, 
instead of fixing their attention on some contempo- 
rary radical, who is usually only his remote and de- 
generate posterity. 

Both friends and enemies are agreed as to the 
commanding position of Rousseau. But in the case 
of Bacon, some recent writers have inclined to dis- 
parage him and his actual contributions to either 
scientific method or discovery as compared with the 
contributions of other pioneers like Kepler or Gali- 
leo or Descartes. But no disparagement will take 


* See, for example, the account of Bacon in Hoffding’s A%story 
of Modern Philosophy (Bk. II, ch. v). 


[37] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


away from Bacon the glory of having been more 
than any one else of his time the prophet of the 
kingdom of man. Whole generations have been 
needed to work out in detail the points of view 
that already existed in a sort of confused unity in 
Bacon’s mind. He was, in short, one of those rare 
beings over whom brooded almost visibly the “ pro- 
phetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things 
to come.” Besides Bacon and Rousseau, Petrarch, 
whose influence radiates along innumerable lines 
into the Renaissance, is the only other person of 
the modern centuries who has this supreme signifi- 
cance. Strange circumstance, all three of these 
great forerunners of the future were men of weak 
and in some respects contemptible character. Usu- 
ally this moral weakness is taken to be more or less 
a matter of chance. We seem loath to admit that 
Petrarch and Bacon and Rousseau were prophetic 
of the modern spirit, not only in their strength, but 
also in their shortcomings. 

For instance, Macaulay’s essay on Bacon is, as 
everybody knows, divided into two parts: the first 
part is devoted to showing how mean Bacon was as 
aman; the second part to setting forth the glories 


[38]. 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


of the Baconian idea of progress. And Macaulay, 
of course, is not slow to improve this opportunity 
for glittering antitheses. But for one who is seeking 
the truth and not rhetorical effect, the significance 
of Bacon’s moral breakdown lies in the very fact 
that it had the same origins as his idea of progress. 
He was led to neglect the human law through a too 
subservient pursuit of the natural law; in seeking 
to gain dominion over things he lost dominion over 
himself; he is a notable example of how a man may 
be “ unkinged,” as Emerson phrases it, when over- 
mastered by the naturalistic temper and unduly 
fascinated by power and success. As we read of the 
investigation of Bacon by the parliamentary com- 
mittee and the mixture of eminent ability and petty 
grafting that this investigation revealed, it all seems 
strangely familiar. We are reminded irresistibly of 
the scandalous disclosures about our own leaders of 
industry and finance. Like Bacon these men have 
fallen away from the “law for man”’ and been “un- 
kinged,” not so much through a sordid love of gain 
as through the fascination of power and success. 
The one-sided anxiety to “get results” has led to 
the excesses that we see, and these excesses are now 


[ 39 ] 


A, 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


bringing down on their perpetrators, as they did on 
Bacon, the inevitable nemesis. 

In the main drift of his life Bacon tends toward 
a scientific positivism, with its setting up of purely 
quantitative and dynamic standards. But in so rich 
and complex a nature we should not neglect the 
eddies and counter-currents. In many respects 
Bacon remains a humanist of the Renaissance (he 
has, for instance, the humanistic disdain for the 
multitude); in other respects he is a traditional 
Christian. He cannot fairly be accused of any such 
shallow infatuation with material progress as appears 
in Macaulay's essay. He was aware of what Emer- 
son calls the “‘double consciousness,’ and that ma- 
terial progress, so far from assuring moral progress, 
may actually imperil man’s higher nature. In the 
preface of the “ Novum Organum” Bacon prays 
solemnly that “from the opening up of the path- 
ways of the senses and a fuller kindling of the 
natural light, there may not result inmen’s souls a 
weakening of faith and a blindness to the divine 
mysteries.” It is as though he foresaw the man of 
the present time, who has paid as the price of his 
triumphs over nature and his splendid efficiency 


[ 40] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


a loss of vision; who is too often spiritually “ un- 
kinged” at the very moment that he is crowned 
with the fullness of material power. 

Bacon’s humanitarianism, the conception of the 
progress of the race as a whole through scientific 
investigation and discovery, was slow in exercising 
an influence on education. It becomes practically 
effective only when it unites with the movement 
for the broadening of knowledge and sympathy 
that makes itself felt throughout Europe in the 
eighteenth century, especially in the France of Rous- 
seau and Diderot. This movement may be regarded 
as the second great era of expansion in modern times, 
the second forward push of individualism. We have 
seen in Rabelais elements of an unselective natu- 
ralism that would close entirely the gap between 
nature and human nature. There are currents of 
this sixteenth-century naturalism that disappear un- 
der ground,as Sainte-Beuve remarks, during the per- 
iod of concentration in the seventeenth century, and 
then, reappearing on the surface, connect our modern 
naturalism with that of the Renaissance. The natu- 
ralism of Diderot, however, has a frankness, not to 


say a crudity and cynicism, that one would scarcely 


[41] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


find even in Rabelais. The principle of selection is 
obscured, on the one hand, by an unbounded ex- 
altation of enthusiasm and sympathy, and, on the 
other, by the prevalence of quantitative and dynamic 
over human standards. Diderot had a truly Gargan- 
tuan hunger for knowledge, a hunger that in the eyes 
of the humanist degenerates into a mere lust (/zdzdo 
sciendt), because of its lack of measure and restraint. 
It is at this moment that the craving for the fullness 
of knowledge and sympathy becomes definitely asso- 
ciated, as it had never been before, with the Baconian 
humanitarianism. Instead of a fastidious selection, 
men were to cultivate a universal and encyclopzedic 
curiosity, and at the same time make this curiosity 
serve the cause of human progress. The full ambi- 
tion of a scholar of this type is first to absorb an 
encyclopedia and then to make a contribution to 
knowledge that will deserve a place in some future 
encyclopeedia. But in practice the two parts of this 
ideal — breadth and thoroughness —have been 
found to be incompatible. Or, is it not rather an 
example of how any point of view works out into 
an ironical contradiction of its own principle, unless 
it is humanized through being tempered by its 


[ 42 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


opposite? The attempt to set up the fullness of 
knowledge and sympathy as a substitute for selec- 
tion and judgment leads straight to the narrowness 
of the modern specialist. For example, the one- 
sidedness of our latest medizevalists is already in 
germ in the magnificent enthusiasms of Herder and 
the Grimm brothers. One of the characters in Gis- 
sing’s “ Whirlpool’”’ makes a confession that is not 
only true of many individuals but symbolizes nine- 
teenth century scholarship as a whole. “I am nar- 
rowing down,” pursued Harvey; “once I had 
tremendous visions —dreamt of holding half a 
dozen civilizations in my hand. I came back from 
the East in a fury to learn the Oriental languages — 
made a start, you know, with Arabic — dropped one 
nation after another. . . . The end will be a coun- 
try or a town, nay, possibly, a building. Why not 
devote one’s self to the history of a market cross? 
. . . Thoroughness is all.” 

When a man finds that it is impossible to know 
everything and know it well, it might be supposed 
that he would seek to. apply to the enormous and 
ever-increasing mass of things to be known some 
humane principle of selection, and in the search for 


[ 43 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 
this principle to fortify his individual insight by the 


wisdom and experience of the race. But such is 
not the reasoning of the Baconian. The fullness 
of knowledge he abandons as something impossible 
for the individual, and by a sort of fiction transfers 
it to humanity in the mass. He does not have the 
humanist’s passion for wholeness, for the harmo- 
nious rounding out of all the faculties. He is will- 
ing to sacrifice this ideal symmetry if only he is 
allowed to cultivate some special faculty or subject 
to the utmost. Having thus turned over the full- 
ness of knowledge to mankind and rid himself of 
the humanistic horror of one-sidedness, he feels 
free to burrow ever more and more deeply into his 
own specialty, like the traditional rat in the Holland 
cheese. What does it matter, he would seem to 
argue, if a man in himself is but a poor lop-sided 
fragment, if only this fragment is serviceable, if only 
it can be built into the very walls of the Temple of 
Progress? He is satisfied if he can attain to the 
highest efficiency, and then contribute by this eff- 
ciency to human advancement. His entire aim, as 
he is wont to tell us with so much unction, is train- 
ing for service and training for power. 


[44] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


But the Baconian, after all, would have been com- 
paratively ineffective in undermining humane stand- 
ards if he had not been reinforced by the Rous- 
seauist. The scientific and sentimental naturalists 
are sharply at variance on many points, but in their 
views on education they often coincide curiously. 
This coincidence will be plain if one compares, for 
example, the book on Education, by Herbert Spen- 
cer, a scientific humanitarian of the purest water, 
with Rousseau’s “Emile.” Indeed, it had always 
been supposed that Spencer had borrowed directly 
from Rousseau,’ but Spencer’s private secretary,” 
who recently published a book on Rousseau, asserts 
that Spencer had never even read the “ Emile.” 

So far as the views of the two types of natural- 
ist are distinguishable, we may say that in the over- 
throw of humanism the idea of scientific progress 
that one finds in Bacon has been powerfully aided 
by the idea of liberty found in Rousseau. Bacon, 
indeed, in his own utterances on what we should 


call nowadays the elective principle, speaks less as 
* See, for example, O. Gréard, Education et Instruction, vol. 
ii, p. 175 ff. 
2 See W. H. Hudson, Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and 
Thought, p. 206 (note). 


[45 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


a scientific humanitarian than as a shrewd observer. 
“Let parents,” he says, “ choose betimes the voca- 
tions and courses they mean their children should 
take ; for then they are most flexible; and let them 
not too much apply themselves to the disposition 
of their children, as thinking they will take best to 
that which they have most mind to. It is true, 
that if the affection or aptness of the children be 
extraordinary, then it is good not to cross it. But 
generally the precept is good: Select the best, habit 
will make it easy and agreeable. (Optimum elige, 
suave et facile tllud factet consuetudo.)” 

This does not sound altogether like President 
Eliot; yet President Eliot in his general temper 
and conception of progress is a good Baconian. 
Only the Baconian idea of progress has been sup- 
plemented in his case by an idea of liberty that 
justifies a well-known French writer on education, 
M. Compayré, in claiming him as a disciple of 
Rousseau." President Eliot’s character and personal 
distinction, we need scarcely add, do not connect 
him with either Bacon or Rousseau, but are de- 


rived —so far as they are derived at all—from 


* G. Compayré, Rousseau et 1 Education de la Nature, Pp. 98, 99. 
[ 46 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


the best Puritan tradition. But President Eliot 
speaks as a pure Rousseauist in a passage like the 
following: “A well-instructed youth of eighteen 
can select for himself a better course of study 
than any college faculty, or any wise man who 
does not know him and his ancestors and his pre- 
vious life, can possibly select for him. . . . Every 
youth of eighteen is an infinitely complex organiza- 
tion, the duplicate of which neither does nor ever 
will exist.”’ There is then no general norm, no law 
for man, as the humanist believed, with reference to 
which the individual should select ; he should make 
his selection entirely with reference to his own tem- 
perament and its (supposedly) unique requirements. 
The wisdom of all the ages is to be as naught com- 
pared with the inclination of a sophomore. Any 
check that is put on this inclination is an unjusti- 
fiable constraint, not to say an intolerable tyranny. 
Now inasmuch as the opinions of even a “ well- 
instructed youth of eighteen” about himself and 
his own aptitudes are likely to shift and veer this 
way and that according to the impressions of the 
moment, we may, perhaps, designate the system 


* Educational Reform, pp. 132, 133- 
[47] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


that would make these opinions all-important “ edu- 
cational impressionism.” This inordinate exaltation 
of the individual sense as compared with the gen- 
eral or common sense of mankind scarcely antedates 
Rousseau. But before going any farther let us listen 
to President Eliot himself on Rousseau and his place 
in education. The following is from an address be- 
fore the National Educational Association : — 
“Dr. Butler very justly named Rousseau as a 
great contributor to educational progress. The main 
work of that man’s life tended and still tends toward 
human liberty, and that one fact has almost sanc- 
tified an execrable wretch. Do you know what 
Rousseau did with five of his wife’s babies, one 
after the other, in spite of her prayers and tears ? 
He put every one of them in succession into the 
public créche, knowing that in the then condition 
of foundling hospitals that destination meant all 
but certain death. Yet we sit here and listen to the 
praise of that mean and cruel creature. How shall 
we account for these two judgments of one man, 
both just ? We can only say that he tied the main 
work of his intellectual] life to the great doctrine of 
human liberty. Verily, to have served liberty will 


[ 48 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


cover a multitude of sins. May you serve freedom 
and humanity in all your labors, and then have no 
sins to cover.’’* 

In reading this passage one has something the 
same sense of a strange psychological anomaly that 
one has in reading Macaulay’s essay on Bacon. 
Rousseau was an “ execrable wretch,’ who was at 
the same time a glorious apostle of liberty. Yet 
nothing is easier to prove than that if Rousseau 
was an execrable wretch, it was directly because of 
his idea of liberty; just as Bacon failed morally, 
not in spite of his idea of progress, but as a result 
of it. 

It has been said that a system of philosophy is 
often only a gigantic scaffolding that a man erects to 
hide from himself his own favorite sin. Rousseau’s 
whole system sometimes strikes one as intended to 
justify his own horror of every form of discipline 
and constraint. There are certain ‘“self-pleasing 
minds,” says Bacon, in a sentence that seems spe- 
cially meant for Rousseau, “ which are so sensible to 
every restraint as they will go near to think their 
girdles and garters to be bonds and shackles.” In 


* Proceedings National Educational Association, 1900, p. 199. 


[ 49 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


his eagerness to be rid of every géve, as he would 
say, Rousseau is ready to tamper with virtue itself. 
Virtue is no longer to be the veto power of the per- 
sonality, a bit and a bridle to be applied to one’s 
impulses, and so imposing a difficult struggle. 
These impulses, Rousseau asserts, are good, and soa 
man has only to let himself go. Instead of the still 
small voice that is heard in solitude and urges to 
self-discipline, virtue is to become a form of enthusi- 
asm; it is to be raised to the dignity of a passion 
much as the elder Dumas claimed to have raised 
history to the dignity of the novel. “If not virtu- 
ous,’ says Rousseau sublimely, “I was at least 
intoxicated with virtue.’”’ He was a moral impres- 
sionist not so much like the ancient sophist through 
an excessive intellectual pliancy, as because he 
would thus rest virtue on the shifting quicksands 
of sensibility. For him as for Coleridge everything 
became impossible when it presented itself as a 
duty or obligation. He will hear of no norm of con- 
duct that is set above individual feeling. 

In a passage which is only one of a score of simi- 
lar purport, Rousseau speaks of “my indomitable 
spirit of liberty which nothing has been able to over- 


[50] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


come. .. . It is certain that this spirit of liberty 
comes to me less from pride than from indolence — 
an indolence that is beyond belief. Everything 
alarms it. The slightest duties of civilized life are 
unendurable to it. A word to utter, a visit to make, 
a letter to write, as soon as they are obligatory are 
torments for me. That is why ordinary intercourse 
with men is odious to me, and intimate friendship 
so dear, because it no longer involves any duty. All 
one has to do is to follow one’s heart; and that 
again is why I have been so fearful of benefits, 
for every benefit calls for gratitude, and I feel that 
I have an ungrateful heart, for the very reason that 
gratitude is a duty.’”’' The rest of the passage is 
equally instructive, but enough has been quoted to 
make clear the relation between Rousseau’s idea of 
liberty and his refusal to accept his duties as a 
father. It is also clear from this passage that Presi- 
dent Eliot has adopted and applied to education 
only one half of this idea of liberty. Like Rous- 
seau, he would release the student from all outward 
constraint ; like Rousseau, he denies that there is a 
general norm, a “law for man,” the discipline of 


1 Lettre 2 M. de Malesherbes (4 January, 1762). 


[51] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


which the individual should receive. But having 
bestowed upon the student the full liberty of Rous- 
seau, it is evident that President Eliot would have 
him use this liberty in a Baconian spirit; he is not 
to profit by his emancipation, as Rousseau himself 
would do, to enjoy a “delicious indolence,’’ but he 
is to work with great energy with reference to his 
personal interests and aptitudes. Unfortunately 
many of our undergraduates are more thorough- 
going Rousseauists in this respect than President 
Eliot. Himself one of the most strenuous of men, 
President Eliot has perhaps not taken enough into 
account the prodigious wis zwertzae in average 
human nature, just as Socrates, the most reason- 
able of men, was led to underestimate the forces of 
unreason. Having provided such a rich and costly 
banquet of electives to satisfy the “infinite vari- 
ety” of youths of eighteen, President Eliot must 
be somewhat disappointed to see how nearly all 
these youths insist on flocking into a few large 
courses ;* and especially disappointed that many of 


* I do not mean to assert that the line of least resistance al- 
ways runs through the large courses. These courses are taken on 


various other grounds, utilitarian, impressionistic, or simply gre- 


[52] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


them should take advantage of the elective system 
not to work strenuously along the line of their spe- 
cial interests, but rather to lounge through their 
college course along the line of least resistance. A 
popular philosopher has said that every man is as 
lazy as he dares to be. If he had said that nine 
men in ten are as lazy as they dare to be, he 
would have come near hitting a great truth. The 
elective system has often been regarded as a 
protest against the doctrine of original depravity. 
This doctrine at best rests on rather metaphysical 
foundations, and is hard to verify practically. The 
Buddhists are perhaps nearer the facts as we 
know them in putting at the very basis of their 
belief the doctrine, not of the original depravity, 
but of the original laziness,' of human nature. ‘“ It 


garious —the desire to do what “the other fellows ” are doing; 
sometimes, too, on humanistic grounds, because they are ably con- 
ducted courses in standard subjects. 

* The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yield- 
ing to the impulses of temperament ( famdda) ; the greatest virtue 
(appamada) is the opposite of this, the awakening from the 
sloth and lethargy of the senses, the constant exercise of the 
active will. The last words of the dying Buddha to his disciples 
were an exhortation to practice this virtue unremittingly (appdmas 
dena sampddetha). 


[53] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


is unimaginable,” says Rousseau, who had arrived 
at the same insight, ‘to what a point man is natu- 
rally lazy... . His first and strongest passion, next 
to that of self-preservation, is to do nothing at all.”' 
And Wordsworth, echoing Rousseau, as he so often 
does, speaks of that ‘ majestic indolence so dear 
to native man.” (Especially dear, every one who 
has taught in a college would be tempted to add, 
to the native undergraduate!) But this indolence, 
which for the Buddhist is the original curse from 
which he is to flee, is for Rousseau the very Arcadia 
of his dreams. 

At this point, however, we need to make some 
important distinctions. We have all heard the un- 
favorable comparisons the public is fond of making 
between the idling undergraduate and the strenuous 
student in the technical school, or between the idle- 
ness of the same student in college and the stren- 
uousness he suddenly develops when he gets to the 
school of law or of medicine. The indolence of which 
the Buddhist complains is, however, too subtle to 
be remedied by mere strenuousness. The hustling 
Baconians, of whom there is no lack in our college 


t Essai sur Porigine des langues, ch. ix (note). 


[54] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


faculties, are naturally inclined to give short shrift 
to the student who has yielded to the charms of a 
“majestic indolence.” If they have their way, they 
will get rid of laziness in the college, but are likely 
to get rid at the same time of the whole idea of 
liberal culture. What the Baconian understands is 
training for power, training with a view to certain 
practical or scientific results. In getting his tech-, 
nical or professional education the student is often, 
of course, immensely stimulated by the plain rela- 
tion it has to his future livelihood. (Even Rous- 
seau admits that the instinct of self-preservation 
may triumph over indolence.) At all times it has 
been difficult to inspire in any considerable body of 
men the love of a disinterested discipline of the 
mind, to make them feel the difference between 
loafing and leisure, and this difficulty has been 
immensely increased through the weakening of all 
standards and the encouragement of impressionism 
by the elective system. 

Little seems likely to survive of the idea of liberal 
culture if it is left on the one hand to the Baconian, 
who neglects the “law for man”’ entirely, and on 
the other to the Rousseauist, who confounds this 


[55] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


law with his own temperament. What is important 
in man in the eyes of the humanist is not his power 
to act on the world, but his power to act upon him- 
self. This is at once the highest and most difficult 
task he can set himself if carried out with reference 
to a humane principle of selection, or what amounts 
to the same thing, to a true principle of restraint. 
By right selection even more than by the fullness 
of knowledge and sympathy, man proves his su- 
periority of essence, and shows that he is something 
more than a mere force of nature. He is tested not 
only by what he does, but equally perhaps by what 
he refrains from doing ; just as a writer is great, not 
only by what he says, but also by what he omits 
saying. The humanist will insist on the distinction 
between energy and will, however much the present 
age seems to have forgotten it. A man may be a 
prodigy of energy and yet spiritually indolent. Na- 
poleon showed his energy by conquering Europe; 
he would have shown his will if at the critical mo- 
ment he had been capable of curbing his own lust 
of power (/zbzdo dominandt). “ If one man conquer 
in battle ten thousand times ten thousand men,” 
says the Buddhist proverb, “and another man con- 


[56] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


quer his own self, he is the greatest of conquerors.” 
That man is most human who can check his faculty, 
even if it be his master-faculty, and his passion, 
even his ruling passion, in its mid-career, and temper 
it by its opposite. 

Our meaning will become clearer if we digress a 
moment into the literary field and study the attitude 
of naturalistic critics toward a writer whom Matthew 
Arnold calls the most humane of men, — Shake- 
speare. According to our definition the humanist 
must maintain a just balance between sympathy and 
selection. No one, of course, would deny the gift 
of sympathy to the poet who has coined the happi- 
est of all phrases that express sympathy, — “the 
milk of human kindness.’”’ But both scientific and 
sentimental naturalists have attempted to dehuman- 
ize Shakespeare by refusing hima principle of selec- 
tion and restraint. For example, Victor Hugo in his . 
book on Shakespeare, which is a thinly disguised 
apology for Hugo himself and his own art, is in- 
terested as a Rousseauist in proving that Shake- 
speare’s genius is purely Titanic and elemental, 
merely the volcanic upheaval of a temperament. 
«« Shakespeare,” says Hugo, “is one of those gen- 


[57] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


iuses badly bridled on purpose by God, so that they 
may go soaring with free sweep of the wing through 
the infinite.’ Taine, again, as a scientific naturalist, 
would see in Shakespeare a pure product of the 
Renaissance, which he considers in turn as a vast 
explosion of uninhibited energy. He insists almost 
as much as Hugo on the violence, the immoderate- 
ness of Shakespeare himself and the characters in 
nis plays. One thinks of Hamlet’s advice to the 
players: ‘‘ In the very torrent, tempest, and as I may 
say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire 
and beget a temperance that may give it smooth- 
ness.” In general Shakespeare observes his own 
precept, though we must admit that at times his art 
would gain by more severe selection and restraint. 
If we wish, however, to find the full frenzy of un- 
bridled passion, we should turn, not to Shakespeare, 
but to certain characters of Victor Hugo. As a 
French critic remarks, passions that are thus exhib- 
ited without any restraining sense of decorum have 
no place in humane literature at all, but should 
rather be relegated to the menagerie in the Jardin 
des Plantes. 

Various critics, in the number men so absolutely 


[58 ] 


BACON AND .ROUSSEAU 


different as Emerson and Professor Santayana, have 
complained of the lack of religion in Shakespeare, 
and it is true that Shakespeare’s world compared 
with that of other great poets, Homer or Sophocles 
or Dante, impresses one less as a cosmos and more 
as a romantic chaos. The force of the Renaissance 
reaction from the Middle Ages may perhaps be 
measured by the extent to which humanity pre- 
vails over divinity in Shakespeare’s works. Yet so 
far as Shakespeare fails to allow sufficiently for 
religion and the sense of a central unity that it 
imparts to life, he falls short of being completely 
humane. However, the strangely violent attack of 
Tolstoy on Shakespeare, and his repeating of the 
old charge of lack of religion, is something different 
and bears directly on our present topic. At bot- 
tom the quarrel between Shakespeare and Tolstoy 
is a quarrel between a humanist and a humani- 
tarian fanatic. Tolstoy, as an avowed disciple of 
Rousseau,’ would suppress entirely the principle of 
selection, and exalt in its place the principle of sym- 


? See letter dated 20 March, 1905, in Annales de la Société 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. i, p. 7: “ Rousseau a été mon maitre 


depuis |’ age de quinze ans, etc.” 


[59] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


pathy, the religion of human brotherhood. What he 
cannot pardon in Shakespeare is that his wisdom is 
only for the few, that his view of life is on the whole 
selective and aristocratic. 

The humanist is equally on his guard against 
the excess of sympathy and the excess of selection, 
against the excess of liberty and the excess of re- 
straint; he would have a restrained liberty and a 
sympathetic selection. He believes that the man of 
to-day, if he does not, like the man of the past, 
take on the yoke of a definite doctrine and dis- 
cipline, must at least do inner obeisance to some- 
thing higher than his ordinary self, whether he calls 
this something God, or, like the man of the Far 
East, calls it his higher Self, or simply the Law. 
Without this inner principle of restraint man can 
only oscillate violently between opposite extremes, 
like Rousseau, who said that for him there was 
“no intermediary term between everything and 
nothing.’”’ With this true restraint, on the other 
hand, he can harmonize these extremes and occupy 
the space between them. Rousseau, who would 
admit of no check upon the unruly desires of the 
heart (/2bzdo sentiendi), was therefore led to set 


[ 60 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


up sympathy for one’s fellow man as a substitute 
for religious obligation ;* and he combined this with 
a fierce assertion of man’s rights and liberties. In 
encouraging men thus to put a sense of their rights 
above their obligations, he assumes that the un- 
bounded self-assertion that results will have a suffi- 
cient offset in unbounded brotherhood. But is it 
true that the principle of sympathy will prevail, un- 
aided, against the elemental forces of self-interest 
that Rousseau would unchain? Yes, replies the 
political economist, it will prevail if it has to deal 
with a self-interest that is properly enlightened. 
Unfortunately this whole search of our humani- 


tarians for some ingenious mixture of altruistic 


* I am, of course, aware that the philosophical theory of sym- 
pathy has an important history in modern times quite apart from 
Rousseau. Bacon already tends to exalt philanthropy above all 
other virtues. English thinkers like Hutcheson and Shaftesbury 
anticipate in important respects not only Rousseau’s ideas about 
sympathy, but his whole moral zstheticism. We should connect 
with these thinkers rather than with Rousseau the réle ascribed to 
sympathy by Hume and the political economists (Adam Smith, etc.). 
The exaltation of pity to the first place in morals is often asso- 
ciated with Schopenhauer, but Schopenhauer himself declares this 

‘innovation in ethics to be the great glory of Rousseau. See Preis- 
schriftiiber die Grundlage der Moral, Werke 4, 2,246 (der 2. Aufl.). 


[ 6x | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


sympathy and “enlightened self-interest” that will 
take the place of religious restraint, is too much of 
an order with the search on the physical plane for 
the secret of perpetual motion. In the absence of 
religious restraint, not only individuals but society 
as a whole will oscillate violently between opposite 
extremes, moving, as we see it doing at present, 
from an anarchical individualism to a utopian col- 
lectivism. In spite of the copious flow of fine sen- 
timents about human brotherhood, what is already 
apparent is the inevitable drift toward imperialistic 
centralization. For, as the French moralist says, 
men must be either the slaves of duty or the slaves 
of force. Prometheus, in the ancient fable, is ar- 
rested by Violence and Power, the envoys of Zeus, 
and forced to “ desist from his philanthropic ways.” * 
The same thing is likely to happen to our modern 
Promethean individualists. 

The issue is somewhat obscured at present be- 
cause the moral habits of an age that had a definite 
doctrine and discipline survive for some time after 
the doctrine itself has become obsolete. As Renan 
said cynically, in explaining why he remained virtu- 

* Aischylus, Prometheus Bound, Sc. I. 


[ 62 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


ous even after his loss of the traditional faith, “A 
chicken will continue to go through the motions of 
scratching for a time, even after its brain has been 
removed.” But the traditional checks and _ inhibi- 
tions will gradually grow fainter, and society will 
then feel, and indeed is already beginning to feel, 
the full impact of a brutal naturalism. 

Our lapse into moral impressionism is also hidden 
from us by the rapid advance of physical science. 
We assume that because we are advancing rapidly 
in one direction we are advancing in all directions ; 
yet from what we know of man in history we should 
rather be justified in assuming the exact opposite. 
Whatever may be true of the doctrine of progress 
in the abstract, it is likely, as held by the average 
American, to prove a dangerous infatuation. We 
reason that science must have created a new heaven 
because it has so plainly created a new earth. And 
so we are led to think lightly of the knowledge of 
human nature possessed by a past that was so pal- 
pably ignorant of the laws of electricity ; and in the 
meanwhile we are blinded to the fact that we have 
men who are learned in the laws of electricity and 
ignorant of the laws of human nature. True, the 


[ 63 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


most optimistic of us cannot help seeing some signs 
of moral degeneracy. But are we not spending 
seventy-five million dollars a year on automobiles, 
with a fair prospect of soon having successful air- 
ships? In view of these glorious achievements, why 
be disquieted by the increase in murders, in suicides, 
in insanity, in divorce, by all the multiplying symp- 
toms of some serious and perhaps fatal one-sided- 
ness in our civilization that is bringing down on us 
its appropriate nemesis? The doubts that beset 
our minds can all be conjured away by the very 
sound of the magic word Progress. A few years 
ago I was walking one Sunday evening along a 
country road in a remote part of New England, and 
on passing a farmhouse saw through the window 
the members of the family around the lighted lamp, 
each one bending over a section of a “yellow” 
journal. I reflected that not many years before the 
Sunday reading of a family of this kind would have 
been the Bible. To progress from the Bible to the 
comic supplement would seem a progress from re- 
ligious restraint to a mixture of anarchy and idiocy. 

What has just been said is not to be taken asa 
general arraignment of the modern spirit by a reac- 


[ 64 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


tionary. No sane person would set out to belittle 
the immense achievements of science since the Re- 
naissance, and still less that great quickening and 
broadening out of sympathy during the last two 
centuries so as to include not only the disinherited 
among men, but even the animals. The more sci- 
entific progress and the more social pity the better. 
Exception can be taken to these things only when 
they are set up as absolute and all-sufficient in 
themselves; when the Baconian would substitute 
quantitative and dynamic for human standards, or 
the Rousseauist would exalt social pity into the 
place of religious restraint as the very keystone of 
the arch of human nature. The “law for man” 
suffers in both cases, and in the case of the Rous- 
seauist there is besides a nameless mixture of what 
used to be called the secular and the theological 
virtues. Justice Brewer is reported to have said in 
a recent address that if the law of love only pre- 
vailed in the business world there would be no need 
of jails, no defaulting bank-cashiers, no over-reach- 
ing by individuals and trusts, etc. This is not 
thinking, but humanitarian reverie. Ifthe world of 


business is ever governed by any law besides that 
[65 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


of the wolf pack, it will not be by the law of love, 
but by the Ten Commandments, notably the com- 
mandment, Thou shalt not steal. 

An unrestricted application of the law of love to 
secular affairs will lead, not to love, but to its oppo- 
site, hatred.' The same is true of an unrestricted 
freedom. In praising the liberty of Rousseau, Presi- 
dent Eliot is in reality praising the liberty of the 
anarchist, not because he is himself an anarchist, 
but because he belongs to a generation which saw 
so keenly the benefits of liberty that it was unable 
to see the benefits of restraint. Yet the present 
would seem no propitious time for indulging in 
what Burke calls “grand and swelling sentiments 
of liberty.’ President Eliot, indeed, reminds one of 
Bossuet’s remark about Marcus Brutus. Brutus, 
says Bossuet, kept on talking liberty when he should 
have been talking restraint,and that in the interests 
of liberty itself. Liberty had already reached that 
excess in Rome where it was on the point of run- 


ning into its opposite, —military despotism. Only a 


* The International Congress of Socialists, which recently met 
at Stuttgart in the name of human brotherhood, was described in 


the newspapers as a “ pandemonium of vituperation.” 


[ 66 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


doctrinaire could deny that liberty in this country 
is similarly being strained to the breaking point, 
that the danger with us, too, is that liberty may 
“‘ grow to a pleurisy and die in its own too-much.”’ 
In the case of our railroads, for instance, the 
difficulty with everybody, from the humblest em- 
ployee who would rather take chances than obey 
the rules, to the president and financiers at the 
top, who have also been running past the red lights 
in their own way, is a lack of discipline and self- 
control. 

At this crisis, when our crying need is a humane 
principle of restraint, the best that our sentimental 
and scientific humanitarians can evolve between 
them is a scheme of training for service and train- 
ing for power. Unfortunately a man may be trained 
for service and trained for power and yet be only a 
philanthropic anarchist. In Schiller’s ‘“ Robbers ” 
(1781), which was written when Germany was filled 
with the influence of Rousseau, one of the robbers 
praises his chief not only as an apostle of liberty 
but as a man of overflowing sympathies. “ Honor- 
able men are not ashamed to serve under such a 
leader. He does not commit murder as we do for 


i [ 67 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


the sake of plunder—and as to money, as soon as 
he has plenty of it at command, he does not seem 
to care a straw for it; and his third of the booty, 
which belongs to him of right, he gives away to 
orphans, or supports promising young men with tt 
at college,” etc. It seems hardly necessary to draw 
the analogy between this philanthropic brigand and 
some captain (Kidd) of industry of our own day. 
One could recently read in the paper of the philan- 
thropies of the richest man in America, and in an- 
other column of the same issue of the prosecution 
of this man for violation of the law. No one need 
doubt the genuineness of Mr. Rockefeller’s desire 
for service, and there can, of course, be no question 
of the success of his training for power. Mr. Harri- 
man, again, has shown amazing efficiency in man- 
aging the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Rail- 
roads, and is also in some respects a sincere helper 
of his fellow men. Yet a few more Harrimans and 
we are undone. 

The mention of these men is not meant to imply 
any sympathy with most of the attacks that are 
now being made upon them. A speaker in Boston 
recently said that Messrs. Rogers and Rockefeller 


[ 68 ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


were not human beings, but “ ghouls and vampires 
in human form.” This is to go to work in true 
Rousseau fashion and set up an imaginary dualism 
in society to take the place of the real dualism in 
the breast of the individual. The evil principle in 
society is represented nowadays by the wicked capi- 
talist, much as it was in the old revolutionary times 
by the wicked king and priest, who were also 
deemed to be of a different species from the rest 
of humanity. Asa matter of fact, Messrs. Rogers 
and Rockefeller are not only human beings but 
representative Americans, who have done with su- 
perior capacity what a multitude of the business 
men of their time would have liked to do. To deny 
this is to convert what should be an anxious search- 
ing into our national standards of success into a 
semi-socialistic crusade on wealth. 

The philanthropic anarchist is, of course, much 
to be preferred to the anarchist who is not even 
philanthropic. Yet it is already beginning to dawn 
dimly on at least a part of the public that a rich 
man who curbed his own lust for power would be 
more to the purpose than another rich man who 
remained uncurbed but devoted a part of his money 


[ 69 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


to “supporting promising young men at college.” 
What is wanted is not training for service and train- 
ing for power, but training for wisdom and training 
for character. A list of questions was recently sent 
around to graduates of the women’s colleges as to 
the relative importance of certain virtues. A major- 
ity of those who replied decided that love of human- 
ity isa more important virtue than self-control. This 
is a view of human nature that may be pardonable in 
- a young woman just out of college. What are we to 
think of our present leaders of public opinion who 
apparently hold a similar view? Let a man first 
show that he can act on himself, there will then be 
time enough for him to act on other men and on 
the world. If we are told that we should give no 
thought to ourselves, but live entirely for others, 
we should reply with Dr. Johnson that our first en- 
deavor should be to rid our minds of cant, of which 
every age has its own special variety ; and that this 
being a philanthropic age, it behooves us to rid our 
minds of the cant of philanthropy. 

The eager efforts of our philanthropists to do 
something for the negro and the newsboy are well 
enough in their way; but a society that hopes to 


[ 7° ] 


BACON AND ROUSSEAU 


be saved by what it does for its negroes and its 
newsboys is a society that is trying to lift itself by 
its own boot-straps. Our real hope of safety lies 
in our being able to induce our future Harrimans 
and Rockefellers to liberalize their own souls, in 
other words to get themselves rightly educated. 
Men of heroic capacity such as Messrs. Rockefeller | 
and Harriman have in some respects shown them- 
selves to be are, of course, born, not made; but 
when once born it will depend largely on the 
humaneness of their education whether they are to 
become heroes of good or heroes of evil. We are 
told that the aim of Socrates in his training of the 
young was not to make them efficient, but to in- 
‘spire in them reverence and restraint; for to make 
them efficient, said Socrates, without reverence and 
restraint, was simply to equip them with ampler 
means for harm." 


? The passage I have thus summarized will be found in Xeno- 


phon, Memorabilia, Bk. iv, ch. iii. 


Til 


THE COLLEGE AND THE DEMO- 
CRATIC SEIRES 


HAvIinG arrived at our working definition of the 
humanist, as well as defined the two main types of 
humanitarians, we have now to consider their rela- 
tion to the college. The elective system, so far as 
it is inspired by the desire of the sentimental 
humanitarian to set up a pure and unrestricted 
liberty, to make selection wholly individual, evi- 
dently denies the principle on which the college 
rests. In 1790 Burke wrote with reference to the 
French followers of Rousseau, who at that time 
were trying to set up a pure and unrestricted 
political liberty: ‘““To make a government requires 
no great prudence. ... To give freedom is still 
more easy. ... But to form a free government ; 
that is, to temper together these opposite elements 
of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, 
requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, 
powerful, and combining mind.” This is a truly 


humane utterance, and no less true of the educa- 


[72] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


tional problem than of the problem in politics. To 
set up pure restraint, as was the tendency of the 
medizeval educator, is easy. To set up pure liberty, 
as our modern radical tends to do, is likewise easy. 
But to temper liberty with restraint in education 
requires ‘“‘a sagacious, powerful, and combining 
mind.” The attempt to establish an unrestricted 
freedom not only strikes at the foundation of the 
college, but is in some respects a palpable affront 
to common sense. Now the Anglo-Saxon, though 
often lamentably lacking in general ideas, is strong 
in common sense, and a reaction is already setting 
in against the excesses of the elective principle. 
Educational /azssez faire such as prevailed at Har- 
vard in the eighties and nineties, for instance, is 
plainly doomed. The new scheme for degrees with 
distinction at Harvard is an important departure 
from pure electivism toward the group system that 
has found favor in so many American institutions. 
The group system in itself seems a fair compro- 
mise between individual inclination and general. 
standards; but if it is not to lead to premature 
specialization, it must evidently be administered by 
men who are in sympathy with the aims of the 


[73] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


American college, and not by men whose scholarly 
ideals are “made in Germany.” Liberty, to be 
humanized, must be tempered by true restraint, 
and not simply by strenuousness. We must insist 
once more on our distinction between energy and 
will. 

A true principle of restraint involves constant 
reference, not merely to one’s own temperament 
and aptitudes, but to a more general human law; it 
implies not only an anxiety to express one’s own 
mind, but to put this mind into some kind of accord 
with what Emerson calls “the constant mind of 
man.” The humanitarian triumph in the college 
has weakened this humane restraint and selection, 
and as an offset has exalted, on the one hand, the 
principle of sympathy, and on the other, scientific 
method or discipline in the “ law for thing.” The 
idea of quality, of high and , objective standards of 
human excellence, has been equally compromised by 
the impressionism of the Rousseauist and by the 
Baconian’s neglect of everything that cannot be 
expressed in terms of quantity and power. As for- 
merly conceived, the college might have been de- 


fined as a careful selection of studies for the crea- 


[74] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


tion of a social élite. In its present tendency, it 
might be defined as something of everything for 
everybody. 

This is precisely what we glorify as the triumph 
of the democratic spirit, —a democracy of studies 
to meet the needs of a student democracy. The 
“democratic spirit’’ is another of those popular 
catchwords that are the delight of the sophist and 
the declaimer and the despair of the serious thinker. 
Evidently the college should be democratic in the 
sense that it should get rid of all distinctions of 
family and rank. We want no American equivalents 
for the types that Thackeray has catalogued in his 
chapters on university snobs. Now the snob may be 
defined as a man who, in his estimate of things, is 
drawn away from their true and intrinsic worth and 
dazzled by outer advantages of wealth, or power, or 
station. There is of course the snob who crawls 
at the feet of the possessor of these advantages, as 
well as the possessor of them who looks down on 
those who are less fortunate than himself. In a few 
of our Eastern colleges the snobbishness of fam- 
ily exists, but not to a dangerous degree. Some 


_of the more luxurious of our college dormitories and 


[75] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


clubhouses testify to an extravagant and foolish 
use of money, but from the snobbishness of wealth 
our colleges as a whole are likewise comparatively 
free. This is the more gratifying when we reflect 
how rampant this snobbishness is in the country at 
large, so much so that the yellow journals show by 
the very nature of their attacks on the rich that 
they are pandering to an intense snobbishness in 
their readers. There is also a laudable desire in 
our colleges to give everybody a chance. Indeed 
the more humanitarian members of our faculties are 
ready to waste their energies in trying to elevate 
youths above the level to which they belong, not 
only by their birth, but by their capacity. 

We are not to assume, however, that our colleges 
are free from snobbishness simply because we read 
in the papers that forty Yale undergraduates are 
paying their way as motormen and trolley-conduc- 
tors and forty more as waiters and bellboys in sum- 
mer hotels. The real snobbishness that prevails 
among our collegians arises, not from the worship 
of family or of wealth, but of power in the special 
form in which it is familiar to them, — that of ath- 
letic prowess. In his estimate of athletic as com- 


[ 76 ] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


pared with intellectual achievement, the average 
American undergraduate is an undoubted snob, and 
is encouraged in his snobbishness by the newspa- 
pers and the public. The principal of a preparatory 
school who gave a position as teacher toa young 
man who could not even get his degree but had 
been prominent athletically, is a snob of a very 
offensive type — at least, as offensive as the Oxford 
dons who used to grant degrees to lords without 
the formality of an examination. Indeed, the Am- 
erican has suffered more seriously in his humane 
standards by his pampering of the athlete than the 
Englishman by his truckling to the lord. The Ox- 
ford student still retains something of the sprezza- 
tura or aloofness of the amateur, who sees in ath- 
letic sport only one, and that a somewhat subordi- 
nate element, in the total make-up of a man anda 
gentleman; whereas the American student pursues 
athletics as an end in themselves, and succumbs in 
true Baconian fashion to the glitter of success. In 
his anxiety to win at any cost, he already displays 
on the football field the spirit he will afterwards 
carry into business. That a community like the 
college, which has met together to do homage to the 


Be [77] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


things of the mind, should in practice worship at the 
feet of the successful athlete — this is an irony that 
no amount of beautiful effusions about the demo- 
cratic spirit can disguise. It is urged with much 
reason that athletic training is needed as an offset 
to certain enervating influences of modern life; but 
without the restraining presence of humane stand- 
ards it will be possible to oscillate between effem- 
inacy and brutality, and at the same time miss the 
note of real manliness. 

The democratic spirit that the college needs is a 
fair field and no favors, and then the more severe 
and selective it is in its requirements the better. 
Most of those, however, who talk about the demo- 
cratic spirit obviously mean something different. 
All of us who have had anything to do with college 
discipline are familiar with the type of sentimental 
humanitarian in whom the delicate balance between 
sympathy and judgment has been lost, and who is 
ready to lower the standard of an institution rather 
than inflict an apparent hardship on an individual. 
In general, the humanitarian inclines to see in the 
college a means not so much for the thorough train- 


ing of the few as of uplift for the many; his aim, 
[78] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


in short, is extensive, not intensive. He is always 
likely to favor any scheme that will bring the bache- 
lor’s degree within reach of a greater number, even 
at the imminent risk of cheapening the degree itself. 
The Rousseauist, by his exaltation of social pity, 
tends along a different path to the same end as the 
Baconian when he confuses growth in the human 
sense with mere bigness and expansion. An inter- 
esting contrast between the humanitarian and the 
humanistic temper appears in the three years’ degree 
as it is being worked out in this country, and the 
three years’ degree that actually exists at Oxford. 
At Oxford the inferior man is allowed to leave at 
the end of the third year with a pass degree; the 
more capable student remains another year and 
works intensively for a degree with honors. In this 
country the good man is encouraged to leave at 
the end of three years, and the inferior or idle stu- 
dent who remains is labored over by a humanita- 
rian faculty in accordance with its great design of 
leavening the lump and raising the social average. 
The scientific humanitarian usually takes a hand at 
this point and suggests a scheme of mechanical equi- 


valents, by which a man who does second-rate work, 


[79] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


let us say, in fifteen courses for four years, is to be 
accounted the academic equal of the man who does 
first-rate work in twelve courses for three years. 
A more flagrant example of the confusion of quality 
in the human with quality in the scientific sense, it 
would be hard to imagine. A scheme of this kind 
will have value when it is proved that the human 
mind can be measured and tested in the same way 
as an electric current. 

In one sense the purpose of the college is not to 
encourage the democratic spirit, but on the contrary 
to check the drift toward a pure democracy. If our 
definition of humanism has any value, what is needed 
is not democracy alone, nor again an unmixed aristo- 
cracy, but a blending of the two—an aristocratic 
and selective democracy. In the lower schools the 
humanitarian point of view should have a large 
place. The university, again, by its very name im- 
plies an encyclopzedic fullness; one should be able 
to say of it in Dryden’s phrase, “ Here is God’s 
plenty.” It should offer ample opportunity to the 
humanist to perfect himself in his own discipline ; 
yet the primary purpose of the university is not to 
maintain the principle of selection. 


[ 80 ] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


The function of the college, on the other hand, 
should be to insist on the idea of quality ; it should 
hold all the faster to its humane standards now that 
the world is threatened with a universal impression- 
ism. Athens is the best example of a selective de- 
mocracy ; the standards of quality it set still remain 
in some lines unsurpassed. But at Athens these 
qualitative achievements did not rest perhaps on a 
sufficiently broad base of quantity and numbers. 
What shall we say of our American democracy ? We 
can often see our faults reflected, as by a magnify- 
ing glass, in foreign opinion, and we should take a 
hint from the fact that the verb to ‘‘Americanize ” 
means in European languages to adopt cheap and 
flashy machine methods. Our Pittsburg millionaires 
are giving us a foretaste of what may be expected 
from a democracy that leads the quantitative life 
and combines it with moral impressionism. We seem 
certain to break all known records of bigness, but 
unless this bigness is tempered by quality we shall 
sprawl helplessly in the midst of our accumulated 
wealth and power, or at best arrive at a sort of 
senseless iteration. Many of our rich men are 
scarcely on a higher level than the Mexican peon, 


[81 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


who, having suddenly come into a great fortune 
through mining, and remembering that his wife 
desired a piano, built her a castle with a thousand 
rooms, and in each room a piano. 

There is another aspect of the democratic spirit 
—the tendency, namely, that the elective system 
has fostered in the college toward a democracy of 
studies; and this can be refuted in the name of a 
higher democracy. Assuming that the selection of 
studies in the old curriculum was purely arbitrary, 
that the respect accorded to certain studies over 
others was superstitious, there would be, even then, 
a great deal to be said in its favor. No one, says 
Emerson, knows what moral vigor is needed to sup- 
ply the girdle of a superstition. But this selection 
was neither arbitrary nor superstitious. It embodied 
the seasoned and matured experience of a multitude 
of men, extending over a considerable time, as to the 
studies they actually found helpful and formative. 
In arriving at a humane selection the individual 
is powerfully abetted by the selection of time. In 
the matter of literary production, for instance, what 
a tremendous selection, as Emerson remarks, has 
taken place, even at the end of ten years. When 


[ 82 | 


am DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


books like the Greek and Latin classics have sur- 
vived for centuries after the languages in which 
they are written are dead, the presumption is that 
these books themselves are not dead, but rather very 
much alive — that they are less related than most 
other books to what is ephemeral and more related 
to what is permanent in human nature. By innu- 
merable experiments the world slowly winnows out 
the more essential from the less essential, and so 
gradually builds up standards of judgment. The 
Rousseauist would subordinate this permanent ele- 
ment of judgment, whether in an individual man or 
in a body of men, to the impulse of the moment. 
The good sense of the whole people tends to tri- 
umph in the long run — this is true democracy ac- 
cording to Lincoln.t The will of a popular majority 


* Why then, it may be asked, should not democracy select 
without restraint? The answer is, that democracy should not be 
restrained in its judgments, but only in its impressions. Three 
institutions in this country — the Senate, Constitution, and Su- 
preme Court — were especially intended to embody the more 
permanent judgments and experience of democracy and at the 
same time serve as a bulwark against popular impulse. Attacks 
on these institutions are usually inspired by the rankest Rous- 


seauism. 


[ 33 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


at any particular instant should be supreme — this 
is the pseudo-democracy of Rousseau. We may 
safely trust the democratic spirit, if by democracy 
we mean the selective democracy of the sober sec- 
ond thought, and not the democracy of the passing 
impression. 

Both our colleges and preparatory schools need 
to concentrate on a comparatively small number of 
standard subjects selected in this democratic way, 
that is to say, so as to register the verdict and em- 
body the experience of a large number of men ex- 
tending over a considerable time. Those who are 
for taking up with every new subject and untried 
fashion are not educational democrats, but educa- 
tional impressionists. Asa result of this impres- 
sionism, our colleges and preparatory schools, instead 
of doing thorough work in a few studies of approved 
worth, are falling into that “ encyclopzedic smatter- 


YY 


ing and miscellaneous experiment ” * which according 

t Laws, 819 A. If we are to judge by the papers and addresses 
of Mr. Wilson Farrand of the Newark Academy, preparatory 
school teachers are already beginning to feel the need of more 
concentration and less ‘encyclopedic smattering ” in college en- 


trance requirements. 


[ 84] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


to Plato are especially harmful in the training of the 
young. The scientist is interested apparently only 
in natural selection; the impressionist would make 
selection purely individual; but what is imperative 
in the college is humane selection, in other words, 
a choice of studies that will reflect in some measure 
the total experience of the race as to the things 
that have been found to be permanently important 
to its essential nature. 

Common sense will aid in finding out what these 
humane studies are. There are many persons in 
this country who would have little interest in the 
generalizations we are attempting in these essays, 
but who have felt the benefits of a college train- 
ing in their own case, and who almost instinct- 
ively would like to see the college stick to its 
traditional business of teaching a few standard 
subjects with a view to a general liberalizing of the 
mind ; who almost instinctively distrust our humani- 
tarian enthusiasts and their readiness to discard the 
sifted experience of generations in order that they 
may apply their own educational nostrums. But 
common sense, although it will do a great deal, will 
not do everything. Humanism may survive in 


[85 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


England simply as a part of the Tory tradition, in 
virtue of that happy stupidity which, according to 
Bagehot, is the great superiority of the Englishman, 
or in virtue of what Burke more politely terms the 
Englishman’s “invincible persistence in the wis- 
dom of prejudice.’”’ It is doubtful, however, whether 
even in England humanism can long survive in this 
purely traditional way ; it certainly cannot do so in 
America. The radical has used ideas in attacking 
the humanistic tradition; the humanist must meet 
him on his own ground and give a clear account of 
the faith that is in him, and then perhaps he will 
have a valuable auxiliary in the instinctive good 
sense of many who are not directly interested in 
his generalizations. 

Friedrich Paulsen, possibly the most distinguished 
of recent German writers on education, remarks that 
in the sixteenth century Germany had the begin- 
nings of a college as something quite distinct from 
either preparatory school or university, and regrets 
that these beginnings did not develop into something 
like the college in England or America. We should 
think twice before sacrificing an institution that on 
the whole has worked so admirably as to excite the 

[ 86 ] 


THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 


envy even of enlightened Germans; especially be- | 
fore sacrificing it,as we seem in danger of doing at 
present, to a mixture of intellectual muddle and hu- 
manitarian cant. There is no intention to disparage 
that great movement of educational expansion dur- 
ing the past thirty years of which President Eliot, 
and in a lesser degree President Gilman, have been 
the worthy leaders. But such is the one-sidedness 
of human nature that this movement, which was 
necessary for the creating of an American univer- 
sity, now menaces the very existence of the college. 
The heads of our colleges should not let a just 
admiration for President Eliot blind them to the 
fact that they need to cultivate not only the virtues 
of expansion, but even more the virtues of concen- 
tration ; that the guiding spirit of the college, if it 
is to continue to live at all and not be lost in the 
university and the preparatory school, must be the 
maintenance of humane standards (though, of course, 
the hollow shell may survive for a time after this 
spirit has departed); that the purpose of the col- 
lege, in short, if it is to have any separate pur- 
pose, must be in a quantitative age to produce men 
of quality. 


IV 
LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


It was with something of the spirit of true prophecy 
that Herbert Spencer proclaimed, in his work on 
Education, the approaching triumph of science over 
art and literature. Science, he said, was to reign 
supreme, and was no longer to be the ‘ household 
drudge ’’ who had “been kept in the background 
that her haughty sisters might flaunt their frip- 
peries in the eyes of the world.” The tables indeed 
have been turned so completely that art and litera- 
ture have not only ceased to be “haughty,” but 
have often been content to become the humble 
handmaids of science. It is to this eagerness of 
the artistic imagination to don the livery of science 
that we already owe the ‘experimental ’’ novel. 
A Harvard Commencement speaker promised, not 
long ago, that we are soon to have poetry that shall 
be less “human” and more “biological.” While 
awaiting these biological bards of the future, we may 
at least deal scientifically with the poets of the 
[ 88 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


past, if we are to trust the title of a recently pub- 
lished Laboratory Method for the study of poetry. 
Another writer, after heaping contempt on the tra- 
ditional views of poetry, produces his own formula, 
and informs us that 


Poem=7+HI+VF. 


Many of us nowadays would seem to be convinced, 
with the French naturalist, that if happiness exists 
anywhere it will be found at the bottom of a cru- 
cible. Renan regretted in his old age that he had 
spent his life on so unprofitable a subject as the 
history of Christianity instead of the physical sci- 
ences. For the proper study of mankind is not 
man, but chemistry ; or, perhaps, our modern atti- 
tude might be more correctly defined as an attempt 
to study man by the methods of physics and chem- 
istry. We have invented laboratory sociology, and 
live in a nightmare of statistics. Language interests 
us, not for the absolute human values it expresses, 

but only in so far as itisa collection of facts and C 
relates itself to nature. With the invasion of this 
hard literalness, the humanities themselves have 
ceased to be humane. I was once told as convincing 


[ 89 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


_ proof of the merit of a certain classical scholar that 
\ he had twenty thousand references in his card 
catalogue. | 
The humanism of the Renaissance was a protest 
against the excesses of the ascetic. Now that sci- 
fence aspires to be all in all, somewhat after the 
iH \ fashion of theology in the Middle Ages, the man 
| 4s) y / who would maintain the humane balance of his 
V ony) | faculties must utter a similar protest against the 
“excesses of the analyst, in whom a “literal obedi- 
ence to facts has extinguished every spark of that 
light by which man is truly man.”’ It is really about 
as reasonable to use a dialogue of Plato merely as 
a peg on which to hang philological disquisitions 
as it was in the Middle Ages to turn Ovid’s “ Art 
of Love”’ into an allegory of the Christian life. In 
its medizeval extreme, the human spirit strove to 
isolate itself entirely from outer nature in a dream 
of the supernatural ; it now tends to the other ex- 
treme, and strives to identify itself entirely with 
the world of phenomena. The spread of this sci- 
entific positivism, with its assimilation of man to 
nature, has had especially striking results in educa- 
tion. Some of our higher institutions of learning 


[ 90 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


are in a fair way to become what a certain eminent 
scholar thought universities should be, — “ great sci- 
entific workshops.” The rare survivors of the older 
generation of humanists must have a curious feel- 
ing of loneliness and isolation. 

The time has perhaps come, not so much to react 
against this nineteenth-century naturalism, as to de- 
fine and complete it, and especially to insist on its 
keeping within proper bounds. The nature cult is 
in danger of being pushed too far, not only in its 
scientific but in its sentimental form. The benefits 
and blessings that Herbert Spencer promises us 
from the scientific analysis of nature are only to be 
matched by those that Wordsworth promises from 
sentimental communion with nature. 

“One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 


Of moral evil and of good, 


Than all the sages can.” 
The sentimental and scientific worship of nature, 
however far apart they may be at some points, have 
much in common when viewed in relation to our 
present subject, — their effect on college education. 
The former, working up into the college from the 


[91 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


kindergarten, and the latter, working downward 
from the graduate school, seem likely between them 
to leave very little of humanistic standards. The 
results are sometimes curious when the two ten- 
dencies actually meet. I once overheard a group 
of undergraduates, in search of “ soft” courses, dis- 
cussing whether they should elect a certain course 
in Old Egyptian. The exaggerations of Wordsworth 
and Herbert Spencer may have served a purpose in 
overcoming a counter-excess of tradition and con- 
ventionalism. But now the nature cult itself is de- 
generating into a kind of cant. The lover of clear 
thinking cannot allow to pass unchallenged many 
of the phrases that the votaries of the Goddess 
Natura have come to utter so glibly, —such phrases, 
for instance, as “‘ obedience to nature’’ and “ natu- 
ral methods.’”’ The word nature — covering as it 
does both the human world and the world of phe- 
nomena —has been a source of intellectual confu- 
sion almost from the dawn of Greek philosophy 
to the present day. To borrow an example from 
French literature, it is equally in the name of 
“nature” that La Fontaine humanizes his animals 
and that Zola bestializes his men. By juggling 


[92] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


with the twofold meaning of the word, Renan ar- 
rived only a few years ago at his famous dictum 
that “nature does not care for chastity.” 

It is a disquieting fact that Rousseau, the man 
whose influence is everywhere in the new educa- 
tion, was remarkable for nothing so much as his 
inability to distinguish between nature and human 
nature. He counts among his disciples all those 
who, like him, trust to the goodness of “nature,” 
and so tend to identify the ideal needs of the indi- 
vidual with his temperamental leaning; who exalt 
instinct and idiosyncrasy ; who, in their endeavor 
to satisfy the variety of temperaments, would push 
the principle of election almost down to the nur- 
sery, and devise, if possible, a separate system of 
education for every individual. For we are living in 
a privileged age, when not only every man, as Dr. 
Donne sang, but every child 

“thinks he hath got 
To bea Pheenix, and that there can be 
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.” 
Our educators, in their anxiety not to thwart native 
aptitudes, encourage the individual in an in-breed- 
-jng of his own temperament, which, beginning in 


[93] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


the kindergarten, is carried upward through the 
college by the elective system, and receives its final 
consecration in his specialty. We are all invited to 
abound in our own sense, and to fall in the direc- 
tion in which we lean. Have we escaped from the 
pedantry of authority and prescription, which was 
the bane of the old education, only to lapse into 
the pedantry of individualism ? One is sometimes 
tempted to acquiesce in Luther’s comparison of 
mankind to a drunken peasant on horseback, who, 
if propped up on one side, slips over on the other. 
What would seem desirable at present is not so 
much a Tory reaction toward the old ideal as a 
sense of measure to save us from an opposite 
excess — from being entirely ‘“ disconnected,” as 
Burke has expressed it, “into the dust and powder 
of individuality.” The need of discipline and com- 
munity of ideal enters into human nature no less 
than the craving for a free play of one’s individual 
faculties. This need the old curriculum, with all 
its faults, did something to satisfy. According to 
Dean Briggs of Harvard, discipline is often left in 
the new education to athletics; and athletics also 


meet in part the need for fellowship and commu- 


[94] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


nion. However much members of the same college 
may be split up in their intellectual interests by 
different electives, they can at least commune in an 
intercollegiate football game. Yet there should like- 
wise be a place for some less elemental form of 
communion; so many of the very forces in the mod- 
ern world that make for material union would seem 
at the same time to tend toward spiritual isolation. 
In this as in other respects we are at the furthest 
remove from medizval Europe, when men were 
separated by almost insuperable obstacles in time 
and space, but were knit together by common stand- 
ards. When it comes to the deeper things of life, 
the members of a modern college faculty some- 
times strike one, in Emersonian phrase, as a collec- 
tion of “infinitely repellent particles.” The mere 
fact that men once read the same book at college 
was no slight bond of fellowship. Two men who 
have taken the same course in Horace have at least 
a fund of common memories and allusions; whereas 
if one of them elect a course in Ibsen instead of 
Horace, they will not only have different memories, 
but, so far as they are touched by the spirit of their , 
authors, different ideals. Only a pure radical can © 


[95 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


imagine that it is an unmixed gain for education to 
be so centrifugal, or that the outward and mechani- 
cal devices that are being multiplied to bring men 
together can take the place of this deeper under- 
standing. 

The sentimental naturalist would claim the right 
to elect Ibsen instead of Horace simply because he 
finds Ibsen more “interesting ;” he thus obscures 
the idea of liberal culture by denying that some 
subjects are more humane than others in virtue of 
their intrinsic quality, and quite apart from individ- 
ual tastes and preferences, The scientific natural- 
ist arrives at the same result by his tendency to ap- 
ply only quantitative tests and to translate every- 
thing into terms of power. President Eliot re- 
marks significantly that the old distinction between 
the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of 
Science “is fading away, and may soon disappear 
altogether; for the reason that the object in view 
with candidates for both degrees is fundamentally 
the same, namely, training for power.” Our col- 
leges are very much taken up at present with the 

, three years’ scheme; but what a small matter this 
is, after all, compared with the change in the degree 


[ 96 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


itself from a qualitative basis to a quantitative and 
dynamic one! If some of our educational radicals 
have their way, the A. B. degree will mean merely 
that a man has expended a certain number of units 
of intellectual energy on a list of elective studies 
that may range from boiler-making to Bulgarian ; 
the degree will simply serve to measure the amount 
and intensity of one’s intellectual current and the 
resistance overcome ; it will become, in short, a ques- 
tion of intellectual volts and amperes and ohms. 
Here again what is wanted is not a hard and fast 
hierarchy of studies, but a sense of measure that 
will save us from the opposite extreme, from the 
democratic absurdity of asserting that all studies 
are, and by right should be, free and equal. The 
rank of studies will finally be determined, not by the 
number of intellectual foot pounds they involve, but 
by the nearness or remoteness of these studies to 
man, the boundaries of whose being by no means 
coincide with those of physical nature : — 
“man hath all which Nature hath, but more, 
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.” 

The future will perhaps arrive at a classification 

of studies as more or less humane. However de- 


[97] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


sirable this humane revival may be, we should not 
hope to bring it about mechanically by proposing 
some brand-new educational reform. For this would 
be to fall into the great error of the age, and at- 
tempt to create the spirit by means and appliances 
instead of taking as our very point of departure the 
doctrine that man is greater than machinery. The 
hope for the humane spirit is not in the munificence 
of millionaires, but in a deeper and more earnest 
reflection on the part of the individual. Emerson’s 
address on the American Scholar is a plea for a hu- 
manism that shall rest on pure intuition; the only 
drawback to Emerson’s programme is that he as- 
sumes genius in his scholar, and genius of a rare 
kind at that. On the other hand, a humanism so 
purely traditional as that of Oxford and the Eng- 
lish universities has, along with elements of great 
strength, certain obvious weaknesses. Perhaps the 
chief of these is that it seems, to the superficial ob- 
server at least, to have forgotten real for conven- 
tional values — the making of a man for the making 
of a gentleman. Herbert Spencer writes of this 
English education: “ As the Orinoco Indian puts 
on his paint before leaving his hut, ... so, a 


[ 98 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, 
not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may 
have the ‘education of a gentleman.’”’ All that may 
be affirmed with certainty is that if the humane 
ideal appear at all in the future, it must be in the 
very nature of things more a matter of individual in- 
sight and less a matter of tradition than heretofore. 
The weakening of traditional authority that our age 
has seen has some analogy with what took place in 
the Greece of Pericles. One may perhaps say, with- 
out pushing the analogy too far, that we are con- 
fronted with the same alternative, — either to attain 
to the true individualism of Socrates, the first of 
the humanists as he has been called, or else to fall 
away into the intellectual and moral impression- 
ism of the sophists. Unpleasant signs of this im- 
pressionism have already appeared in our national 
theatre and newspaper press, in our literary criti- 
cism, our philosophy, and our popular novel. Our 
greatest danger, however, is educational impres- 
sionism. | 
Changes may very well be made in the mere form 
of the A. B. degree, provided we are careful to re- 
tain its humane aspiration. But through lack of 


[99 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


clear thinking, we seem likely to forget the true 
function of the college as opposed to the graduate 
school on the one hand, and the preparatory school 
on the other. This slighting of the college is also 
due in part to German influences. Some of our 
educational theorists would be willing to unite the 
upper part of the college course with the graduate 
school and surrender the first year or two of it to 
the preparatory school, thus arriving at a division 
similar to the German gymnasium and university. 
This division is logical if we believe with Pro- 
fessor Miinsterberg that there are but two kinds of 
scholars, ‘‘ productive” and ‘‘receptive’’ scholars 
— those who discover knowledge, and those who 
‘distribute’ it; and if we also agree with him in 
thinking that we need give “the boy of nineteen 
nothing different in principle from what the boy 
of nine receives.” * But the youth of nineteen does 
differ from the boy of nine in one important par- 
ticular, — he has become more capable of reflection. 
This change from the receptive to the reflective and 
assimilative attitude of mind is everything from 
the humane point of view, and contains in fact the 
© American Traits, p. 89. 


[ 100 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


justification of the college. Professor Miinsterberg 
stigmatizes our college scholarship not only as 
‘receptive,’ but as “passive” and ‘feminine ” 
(though, to be sure, this bad state of affairs has 
been somewhat mended of late by the happy influ- 
ence of Germany). But this is simply to overlook 
that humane endeavor which it is the special pur- 
pose of the college to foster — that effort of reflec- 
tion, virile above all others, to codrdinate the scat- 
tered elements of knowledge, and relate them not 
only to the intellect but to the will and character ; 
that subtle alchemy by which mere learning is 
transmuted into culture. The task of assimilating 
what is best in the past and present, and adapting it 
to one’s own use and the use of others, so far from 
lacking in originality, calls for something akin to crea- 
tion. Professor Miinsterberg regards the relation be- 
tween the productive scholar and the college teacher 
as about that between an artist like Sargent and a 
photographer. He goes on to say that “the purely 
imitative thinker may make a most excellent teacher. 
Any one who has a personality, a forcible way of 
presentation, and an average intellect, will be able 
to be a fine teacher of any subject at six weeks’ 


[ ror ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


notice.” This German notion of knowledge as some- 
thing that is dumped down on one mind and then 
‘“‘ distributed’’ in the same mechanical fashion to 
other minds, is precisely what we need to guard 
against. The ambition of the true college teacher is 
not to “distribute’’ knowledge to his students, not 
“to lodge it with them,’’ as Montaigne says, “ but to 
marry it to them and make it a part of their very 


” 


minds and souls.” We shall have paid a heavy price 
for all the stvengwissenschaftliche Methode we have 
acquired from Germany if it makes us incapable 
of distinguishing between mere erudition and true 
scholarship. . 

Granting, then, that the receptive attitude of 
mind must largely prevail in the lower schools, and 
that the productive scholar should have full scope 
in the graduate school, the college, if it is to have 
any reason at all for existing separately, must stand, 
not for the advancement, but for the assimilation of 
learning, and for the perpetuation of culture. This 
distinction is fairly obvious, and one would almost 
be ashamed to recall it, did it not seem to be over- 
looked by some of the men who are doing the most 

* Tbid., p. 95- 
[ 102 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


to mould American education. The late President 
Harper, for example, in his address on the future of 
the small college, proposed that some of these col- 
leges be reduced to the rank of high schools, that 
others be made into “ junior colleges ’”’ (in due sub- 
ordination to the larger institutions, and taking the 
student only to the end of the sophomore year), 
and that others justify their existence by cultivat- 
ing specialties. The great universities, for their 
part, are to be brought into closer relations with 
one another so as to form a sort of educational 
trust. Now President Harper was evidently right 
in thinking that the small colleges are too numer- 
ous, and that no one would be the loser if some of 
them were reduced to the rank of high schools. 
Yet he scarcely makes mention in all his scheme 
of what should be the real aim of the small college 
that survives, namely, to teach a limited number of 
standard subjects vivified and informed by the spirit 
of liberal culture. From whatever side we approach 
them, these new theories are a menace to the small 
college. Thus the assumption that a student is 
ready for unlimited election immediately on com- 


pleting his preparatory course puts at a manifest 


[ 103 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


disadvantage all save a very few institutions; for 
only a few institutions have the material resources 
that will permit them to convert themselves into 
educational Abbeys of Théleme and write over their 
portals the inviting legend: Study what you like. 
The best of the small colleges will render a service 
to American education if they decide to make a 
sturdy defense of the humane tradition instead of 
trying to rival the great universities in displaying a 
full line of educational novelties. In the latter case, 
they may become third-rate and badly equipped sci- 
entific schools, and so reénact the fable of the frog 
that tried to swell itself to the size of the ox. 

The small colleges will be fortunate if they ap- 
preciate their own advantages; if they do not fall 
into the naturalistic fallacy of confusing growth in 
the human sense with mere expansion; if they do | 
not allow themselves to be overawed by size and 
quantity, or hypnotized by numbers. Even though 
the whole world seem bent on living the quantita- 
tive life, the college should remember that its busi- 
ness is to make of its graduates men of quality in 
the real and not the conventional meaning of the 
term. In this way it will do its share toward cre- 


[ 104 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ating that aristocracy of character and intelligence 
that is needed in a community like ours to take the 
place of an aristocracy of birth, and to counteract 
the tendency toward an aristocracy of money. A 
great deal is said nowadays about the democratic 
spirit that should pervade our colleges. This is 
true if it means that the college should be in pro- 
found sympathy with what is best in democracy. It 
is false if it means, as it often does, that the college 
should level down and suit itself to the point of 
view of the average individual. Some of the argu- 
ments advanced in favor of a three years’ course 
imply that we can afford to lower the standard of 
the degree, provided we thereby put it within reach 
of a larger number of students. But from the 
standpoint of the college one thoroughly cultivated 
person should be more to the purpose than a hun- 
dred persons who are only partially cultivated. The 
final test of democracy, as Tocqueville has said, 
will be its power to produce and encourage the 
superior individual. Because the claims of the 
average man have been slighted in times past, does 
it therefore follow that we must now slight the 


claims of the superior man? We cannot help 


[ 105 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


thinking once more of Luther’s comparison. The 
college can only gain by close and sympathetic con- 
tact with the graduate school on the one hand, and 
the lower schools on the other, provided it does not 
forget that its function is different from either. 
The lower schools should make abundant provision 
for the education of the average citizen, and the 
graduate school should offer ample opportunity for 
specialization and advanced study; the prevailing 
spirit of the college, however, should be neither 
humanitarian nor scientific, —though these ele- 
ments may be largely represented, — but hu- 
mane, and, in the right sense of the word, aristo- 
cratic. 

In thus sketching out an idea! it costs nothing, 
asa French writer remarks, to make it complete and 
pretentious. One reason why we are likely to fall 
so far short of our ideal in practice is the difficulty, 
as things now are, of finding the right kind of col- 
lege teacher. Professor Miinsterberg praises his 
German teachers because they never aspired to be 
more than enthusiastic specialists, and he adds that 
‘no one ought to teach in a college who has not 
taken his doctor’s degree.’’ This opinion is also 

[ 106 } 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


held by many Americans, and hence the fetish wor- 
ship of the doctor’s degree on the part of certain 
college presidents. But one may shine as a pro- 
ductive scholar, and yet have little or nothing of 
that humane insight and reflection that can alone 
give meaning to all subjects, and is especially ap- 
propriate in a college teacher. The work that leads 
to a doctor’s degree is a constant temptation to sac- 
rifice one’s growth as a man to one’s growth as a 
specialist. We must be men before being entomolo- 
gists. The old humanism was keenly alive to the 
loss of mental balance that may come from know- 
ing any one subject too well. It was perhaps with 
some sense of the dangers of specialization that the 
ancient flute-player replied to King Philip, who 
wished to argue a point of music with him: “ God 
forbid that your majesty should know as much 
about these things as I do.” England is perhaps 
the only country in which something of this ideal 
of the elegant amateur — “ ]’honnéte homme qui ne 
se pique de rien ”— has survived to our own day. 
Compared with the Germans the English still are, 
as some one recently called them, a nation of ama- 
teurs. However, a revulsion of feeling is taking 


[ 107 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


place, and one might imagine from the tone of some 
recent English articles that the writers would like 
to see Oxford converted into a polytechnic school. 
The whole problem isa most difficult one: the very 
conditions of modern life require us nearly all to be 
experts and specialists, and this makes it the more 
necessary that we should be on our guard against 
that maiming and mutilation of the mind that come 
from over-absorption in one subject. Every one 
remembers the passage in which Darwin confesses 
with much frankness that his humane appreciation 
of art and poetry had been impaired by a one- 
sided devotion to science. 

We should at least insist that the college teacher 
of ancient or modern literature be something more 
than a mere specialist. LTo regard a man as quali- 
fied for a college position in these subjects sim- 
ply because he has investigated some minute point 
of linguistics or literary history —this, to speak 
plainly, is preposterous. If we are told that this is 
a necessary test of his originality and mastery of 
method, we should reply that as much originality 
is needed for assimilation as for production, — far 
more, indeed, than enters into the mechanical com- 


[ 108 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


pilations so often accepted for doctors’ theses in this 
country and Germany. This outcry about origin- 
ality is simply the scientific form of that pedantry 
of individualism, so rampant at the present hour, 
which, in its sentimental form, leads, as we have 
seen, to an exaggerated respect for temperament 
and idiosyncrasy. One of the surest ways of being 
original nowadays, since that is what we are all 
straining so anxiously after, would be simply to 
become a well-read man (in the old-fashioned sense 
of the term), to have a thorough knowledge and 
imaginative appreciation of what is really worth 
while in the literature of the past. The candi- 
date for the doctor’s degree thinks he can afford 
to neglect this general reading and reflection in 
the interests of his own private bit of research. 
This pedantic effort to be original is especially fla- 
grant in subjects like the classics, where, more 
than elsewhere, research should be subordinated to 
humane assimilation. What are we to think of the 
classical student who sets out to write his thesis 
before he has read widely, much less assimilated, 
the masterpieces of Greece and Rome? Unfor- 
tunately, this depreciation of assimilative and re- 


[ 109 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


flective scholarship falls in with what is most super- 
ficial in our national temperament — our disregard 
for age and experience in the race or the indi- 
vidual, our small esteem for the “ancient and per- 
manent sense of mankind” as embodied in tradi- 
tion, our prejudice in favor of young men and new 
ideas. In our attitude toward age and tradition, 
some of us seem bent on going as far in one direc- 
tion as the Chinese have gone in the other. Youth 
has already come to be one of the virtues chiefly 
appreciated in a minister of the gospel Tocque- 
ville remarks that the contempt for antiquity is one 
of the chief dangers of a democracy, and adds with 
true insight that the study of the classics, there- 
fore, has special value for a democratic community. 
In point of fact, the classical teacher could attempt 
no higher task than this imaginative interpretation 
of the past to the present. It is to be accounted 
one of the chief disasters to our higher culture that 
our Classical teachers as a body have fallen so far 
short of this task, that they have come instead so 
entirely under the influence of the narrowest school 
of German philology, the school of Lachmann and 
Gottfried Hermann. The throng of scholiasts and 


[ 110 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


commentators whom Voltaire saw pressing about 
the outer gates of the Temple of Taste now occupy 
the sanctuary. The only hope for the future of 
classical studies is in a quite radical change of direc- 
tion, and, first of all, in an escape from their pre- 
sent isolation. For instance, a better test than a 
doctor’s degree of a man’s fitness to teach classics 
in the average college would be an examination de- 
signed to show the extent and thoroughness of his 
reading in the classical languages and his power to 
relate this knowledge to modern life and literature. 
This foundation once laid, the research instinct 
might develop naturally in those who had a turn 
for research, instead of being developed, as it is 
now, in all alike under artificial pressure. But it is 
hardly probable that our classical teachers will wel- 
come any such suggestion. For, unlike the old 
humanists as they may be in most other respects, 
they still retain something of their pride and exclu- 
siveness ; they are still careful to remind us by their 
attitude that Latin and Greek are /ittere humant- 
ores, however little they do to make good the claim 
to this proud distinction. They may be compared 
to a man who inherits a great name and estate, the 


Prat | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


possession of which he does not sufficiently justify 
by his personal achievement. 

The teaching of the classics will gain fresh inter- 
est and vitality by being brought into close contact 
with medizeval and modern literature; we should 
hasten to add that the teaching of modern languages 
will gain immensely in depth and seriousness by 
being brought into close contact with the classics. 
Neither condition is fulfilled at present. The lack 
of classical teachers with an adequate foreground 
and of modern language teachers with an adequate 
background is one of the chief obstacles to a revival 
of humane methods. Yet nothing could be more un- 
profitable under existing conditions than the continu- 
ance in any form of the old quarrel of the Ancients 
and Moderns. “I prefer the philosophy of Mon- 
taigne,” says Charles Francis Adams in his address 
on the College Fetish, “to what seem to me the 


” 


platitudes of Cicero.” As though it were possible 
to have a full understanding of Montaigne without 
knowledge of the “platitudes”’ of Cicero, and the 
whole of Latin literature into the bargain! The 
teacher of French especially, if he would avoid super- 


ficiality, needs to be steadied and ballasted by a 


farr2i 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


thorough classical training. It is so much easier to 
interest a class in Rostand than in Racine that he is 
in constant danger of falling into cheap contempo- 
raneousness. A French instructor in an Eastern col- 
lege told me that asa result of long teaching of his 
subject he had come to know the “ Trois Mousque- 
taires ’ better than any other work in all literature ; 


’ 


and the “ Trois Mousquetaires’”’ is a masterpiece 
compared to other texts that have appeared, texts 
whose literary insignificance is often equaled only 
by the badness of the editing. The commercialism 
of the large publishers works hand in hand here 
with the impressionism of modern language teach- 
ers, so that the undergraduate of to-day sometimes 
has the privilege of reading a novel of Georges. 
Ohnet where a generation ago he would have read 
Plato. 

Those who have faith in either ancient or modern 
languages as instruments of culture should lose no 
time in healing their minor differences if they hope 
to make head against their common enemies, — the 
pure utilitarians and scientific radicals. Herbert 


* There has been improvement in this respect during the past 


few years. 


[ 113 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Spencer, who may be taken as the type of these 
latter, holds that scientific analysis is a prime neces- 
sity of life, whereas art and literature are only forms 


” 


of “play,” the mere entertainment at most of our 
idle moments. And he concludes in regard to these 
subjects : “ As they occupy the leisure part of life, 
so should they occupy the leisure part of education.” 
That this doctrine which reduces art and literature 
to a sort of dilettanteism should find favor with 
pure naturalists is not surprising. The case is more 
serious when it is also accepted, often unconsciously 
perhaps, by those who are working in what should 
be the field of literature. Many of the students of 
linguistics who have intrenched themselves in our 
college faculties are ready to grant a place to litera- 
ture as an occasional relaxation from the more seri- 
ous and strenuous labors of philological analysis. 
Only a man must not be too interested in litera- 
ture under penalty of being thought a dilettante. 
A young philologist once said to me of one of his 
colleagues: “ He is almost a dilettante — he reads 
Dante and Shakespeare.” It is perhaps the Spen- 
cerian view of art that accounts also for a curious 
predilection I have often noticed in philologists for 


[114 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


vaudeville performances and light summer fiction. 
Certain teachers of literature, it must be confessed, 
— especially teachers of English, — seem to have a 
similar conception of their rédle, and aspire to be 
nothing more than graceful purveyors of zesthetic 
.solace, and arbiters of the rhetorical niceties of 
speech. The philologist and the dilettante are 
equally far from feeling and making others feel that 
‘ true art and literature stand in vital relation to hu- 
man nature as a whole, that they are not, as Spen- 
cer’s theory implies, mere refined modes of enjoy- 
ment, mere titillations of the esthetic sensibility. 
Some tradition of this deep import of humane let- 
ters for the higher uses of man was maintained, 
along with other knowledge of value, in the old col- 
lege curriculum. Now that this humane tradition is 
weakening, the individual, left to his own resources, 
must seek a substitute for it in humane reflection. 
In other words, —and this brings us once more 
to the central point of our discussion, — even if we 
sacrifice the letter of the old Bachelor of Arts de- 
gree, we should strive to preserve its spirit. This 
spirit is threatened at present in manifold ways, — 


by the upward push of utilitarianism and kindergar- 


[115] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ten methods, by the downward push of profession- 
alism and specialization, by the almost irresistible 
pressure of commercial and industrial influences. 
If we sacrifice both the letter and the spirit of the 
degree, we should at least do so deliberately, and 
not be betrayed through mere carelessness into 
some educational scheme that does not distinguish 
sufficiently between man and an electric dynamo. 
The time is above all one for careful thinking and 
accurate definition. Money and enthusiasm, excel- 
lent as these things are, will not take the place 
of vigorous personal reflection. This, it is to be 
feared, will prove unwelcome doctrine to the ears of 
an age that hopes to accomplish its main ends by 
the appointment of committees, and has developed, 
in lieu of real communion among men, nearly every 
form of gregariousness. Professor Miinsterberg 
thinks that our highest ambition should be to rival 
Germany in productive scholarship. To this end 
he would have us establish a number of twenty-five- 
thousand-dollar professorships, and appoint to them 
our most meritorious investigators and masters of 
scientific method; in addition he would have us 


heap on these chosen heroes of research every man- 
[ 116 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ner of honor and distinction. But he will seriously 
mislead us if he persuades us that productive schol- 
arship is our chief educational problem. We must 
insist that a far more important problem just now 
is to determine the real meaning and value of the 
A. B. degree. However, we should be grateful to 
Professor Miinsterberg for one thing: in dealing 
with these fundamentals of education, he is com- 
paratively free from that indolent and impression- 
istic habit of mind that so often marks our own 
manner of treating them. He does us a service in 
forcing us to search more carefully into our own 
ideas if only in order to oppose him. Almost any 
opinion that has been thoroughly thought out is 
better than a mush of impressionism. For, as Bacon 
has said, truth is more likely to be helped forward 
by error than by confusion. 


Vv 


LITERATURE AND THE DOCTOR’S 
DEGREE 


It is related of Darwin that after a morning of 
hard work in his study he was wont to come out 
into the drawing-room and rest on the sofa while 
listening to a novel read aloud. This anecdote may 
serve as a symbol not only of the scientific attitude 
toward literature, but of the place that literature 
is coming to occupy in life. The modern man re- 
serves his serious energy for science or sociology 
or finance. What he looks for when he turns to 
pure literature is a soothing and mildly narcotic 
effect. Many people, of course, do not seek in books 
even the solace of their idle moments, but leave 


97 


art and literature to women. “Poetry,” as Lofty 
says, speaking for men of business, “is a pretty 
thing enough for our wives and daughters, but not 
for us.” In the educational institutions, especially 
the large universities of the Middle West, the men 
flock into the courses on science, the women affect 
the courses in literature. The literary courses, in- 


[ 118 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


deed, are known in some of these institutions as 


’ 


“sissy” courses. The man who took literature too 
seriously would be suspected of effeminacy. The 
really virile thing is to: be an electrical engineer. 
One already sees the time when the typical teacher 
of literature will be some young dilettante who will 
interpret Keats and Shelley to a class of girls. As 
it is, the more vigorous and pushing teachers of 
language feel that they must assert their manhood 
by philological research. At bottom they agree 
with the scientist —and the dilettante — in seeing 
in literature the source not of a law of life, but of 
more or less agreeable personal impressions. 

The distinction between the dilettante and the 
philologist is closely related to the more general 
distinction we have already made between the sen- 
timental and the scientific naturalist, or, as we have 
agreed to call them, between the Rousseauist and 
the Baconian. Many of the grammarians in ancient 
Alexandria did work very similar to that of our 
contemporary philologists. Evidently, however, they 
took a much more modest view of their profession, 
and this was because the Alexandrian was not like 


the modern philologist, exalted in his own eyes 


[119 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


by the feeling that he was contributing by his re- 
search to the advancement of learning and pushing 
at the great car of progress. It is by their defin- 
ite contribution to knowledge that our modern 
linguistic Baconians would wish to be esteemed; 
provided they can get at the precise facts in their 
study of language, and then disengage from these 
facts the laws that are supposed to govern them, 
they are content to turn the human values over 
to the Rousseauist and to the vagabondage of 
intellect and sensibility in which the Rousseauist 
delights. 

Once more, however, we are arrested by the need 
of right definition. The word philology is used 
nowadays to cover everything from Vedic noun 
inflections to literary criticism and the Epistles of 
St. Paul.t By the very classifications they insert 
in university catalogues our philologists make clear 
that they look on literature itself as only a depart- 
ment of philology. We can scarcely hope to define 
this strangely elastic term in a way that will be 
generally acceptable, but we can at least define it 
for our present use. 

* See Harvard University Catalogue, 1906-07, pp. 439, 440. 


[ 120 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


In coming at our definition we need to return for 
a moment to Emerson’s distinction between the 
two laws “not reconciled.” So far as language falls 
under the “ law for thing,” it is philology; so far 
as it expresses the “law for man,” it is literature. 
In following out the phenomenal relationships of 
language and literature, philology has a vast and 
important field. It becomes an abuse and a usurpa- 
tion only when it would set up these phenomenal 
relationships as a substitute for the still more im- 
portant relationships of language and literature to 
the human spirit. Again, the appeal of literature 
to the individual intellect and sensibility has a large 
_and legitimate place. Impressionism and dilettante- 
ism arise only when the individual would emanci- 
pate himself entirely from the discipline of more 
general standards. 

The philologist as we know him nowadays is not 
always a grammarian who differs from his Alex- 
andrian prototype merely in being puffed up by 
the Baconian sense of contributing to human pro- 
gress. That variety of philologist, to be sure, is still 
extremely common, especially among our classical 
teachers. But there is another school of philology 


eek] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


which has found full expression only in compara- 
tively recent times and is more closely akin to his- 
tory than to linguistics ; or it would be more correct 
to say that the keener sense of historical relativity, 
of growth and development, that marked the nine- 
teenth century has profoundly modified all forms of 
history, including the history of literature. Unfor- 
tunately it has proved extremely difficult in practice 
to combine the historical method with a due regard 
for intrinsic values. To do this properly is to medi- 
ate between the absolute and the relative, and this, 
as we have seen, is the most difficult of all the 
adjustments the humanist has to make. The great 
danger of the whole class of philologists we are dis- 
cussing is to substitute literary history for literature 
itself — a danger that has been especially manifest 
in a field where literary phenomena are numerous 
and genuine literature comparatively scarce, that of 
the Middle Ages. The interest of a certain type 

* The Middle Ages had plenty of intellectual power, but this 


was largely diverted from the vernaculars into Latin and the 
scholastic philosophy. With the exception of Dante’s poem, 
the Middle Ages hardly succeeded in expressing themselves so 
completely in literature as they did, for example, in the Gothic 


cathedral. 


Bee 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


of medizevalist in the object of his study would often 
seem to be in inverse ratio to its real importance. 
The vital question, after all, is not whether one 
chanson de geste is derived from another chanson 
de geste, but whether either work has in itself 
any claim to the attention of a serious person. I 
have heard of Ph. D. examinations of candidates 
who were planning to teach modern literature, where 
the questions were almost entirely on the medizeval 
field ; and on minute points of linguistics and liter- 
ary history, at that, with only incidental mention 
of the medizval authors who are important for the 
humanist, — Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio. 

Our modern philologists often accuse their clas- 
sical brethren of being narrow and illiberal because 
they do not make a fuller use of the historical 
method. But the trouble lies deeper, and is not to 
be remedied by substituting one school of philology 
for another. The historical method is invaluable, 
but only when it is reinforced by a sense of abso- 
lute values.t In itself a great deal of the Quellen- 


* What I say here on the historical and comparative methods 
needs to be completed by what I say on the same subject in the 
essays on the ‘‘ Rational Study of the Classics” and on ‘‘ An- 


cients and Moderns.” 


[ 123 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


forschung that goes on at present is really on a 
lower level than good old-fashioned grammar or 
text criticism. The man who has that dry book- 
keeping habit of mind, which is perennial, wins 
repute as a scholar to-day by some study of origins 
and influences, much as he might have got on as 
a critic in neo-classic days by talking about the 
‘‘rules’’ and cataloguing “ beauties’”’ and “ faults.” 
Comparative literature owes its sudden prosperity 
to the talismanic virtues that are supposed to be- 
long to the historical and comparative methods. 
/But comparative literature will prove one of the 
most trifling of subjects unless studied in strict 
ye subordination to humane standards. For instance, 
the relationship of Petrarch to the sonneteers of 
the Renaissance is interesting, but the weightier 
problem is how both Petrarch and his disciples are 
related, not to one another, but to the “ constant 
mind of man.” Comparative literature may become 
positively pernicious if it is allowed to divert under- 
graduates from gaining a first-hand acquaintance 
with the great classics, to a study of interrelation- 
ships and interdependencies either of individual 
authors or of national literatures. Besides, there is 


[124 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


no necessary connection between an author’s his- 
torical influence and significance and his true worth. 
Petrarch deserves on the whole a larger place in 
literary history than Dante, and yet is far inferior 
to Dante both as a writer and as a man. 

The corruption of literature by historical philo- 
logy resembles what has taken place in history 
itself. The historians, likewise, have been too exclu- 
sively occupied with the phenomena of their sub- 
ject, and have failed to adjust the rival claims of 
the absolute and the relative. In one of his essays 
Bacon tries to get at some of the underlying laws 
of the human spirit as they are manifested in the 
phenomena of history, and at the same time warns 
us against fixing our gaze too intently on these 
phenomena themselves. “It is not good,” he says, 
“to look too long on these turning wheels of vicis- 
situde. As for the philology of them, that is but a 
circle of tales, and therefore not fit for this writ- 
ing.” Here is a correct use of the word philology 
by a great master of thought and language —so 
correct, indeed, as almost to seem a prophecy of 
our most recent scholarship and the excess into 


which it has fallen. The danger of a former type 


[125 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


of scholar was to gloss over the infinite complexity 
of the facts with a few facile generalizations. The 
danger of the scholar of to-day is rather to philo- 
logize everything, to turn literature and history 
and religion itself into a mere “circle of tales,” — 
in other words, to make endless accumulations of 
facts, and then fail to disengage from these accu- 
mulated stores their permanent human values. 
What has just been said may seem to some to 
echo the attacks of Carlyle on Dryasdust, and in 
general the attacks of the whole romantic school 
on the-abuse of scientific analysis. But at bottom 
nothing could be more different from each other 
than the protests of the humanist and the romanti- 
cist against the excess of dry analysis and fact- 
collecting. The romanticist protests because this 
excess interferes with enthusiasm, with the free 
play of emotion; the humanist protests because it 
interferes with judgment and selection. In spite of 
the opprobrious epithets Carlyle heaped upon him, 
Dryasdust has prospered, and is now teaching his- 
tory —and literature—in our American colleges. 
Indeed, one may go farther and say that Dryas- 
dust has been helped rather than hindered by the 
[ 126 | 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


romanticist. The excess of dry fact-collecting is 
the natural rebound from an excess of undisciplined 
emotion. How often Carlyle himself fails to dis- 
tinguish between the “law for man” and what is 
simply law for Carlyle! But Carlyle, after all, is 
something more than a mere romantic impression- 
ist. Our meaning will perhaps be better illustrated 
by a historian like Michelet, who was a thoroughgo- 
ing Rousseauist. A person who reads continuously 
Michelet’s account of the French Revolution is 
tempted to exclaim at last: In Heaven’s name, 
let us have the cold facts, unembroidered by these 
arabesques of a disordered fancy, and undistorted 
by the hallucinations of a revolutionary tempera- 
ment! Since a man cannot put the human ele- 
ment into his work without thus being wantonly 
subjective, let him eliminate the human element 
’ entirely, and attain at least to the objectivity of 
‘the scientist. This is the reasoning that the whole 
of French literature went through after the riot of 
subjectivity indulged in by the romantic school of 
1830. The great writers have known how to be at 
once objective and human ; but the French writers 


who tried to escape from the romantic excess of 


[127 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


emotion by scientific detachment, by subjecting 
man entirely to the “law for thing,” fell, as a 
French critic expresses it, into a “stark inhuman- 
ity.” And this is usually what happens to the fact- 
collecting, scientific historian. By selecting his 
facts and affirming a judgment he would, of course, 
run the risk of expressing nothing higher than his 
own temperament; but even this is better than to 
run the risk of expressing nothing human at all. 
We have been talking all along as though the 
scientist and the impressionist, the philologist and 
the dilettante were necessarily separate and antago- 
nistic persons; but this is very far from being the 
case. Philology and dilettanteism are in reality only 
the analytical and the esthetic, or, as one would be 
tempted to say, the masculine and-.the feminine 
aspects of the same naturalistic movement. They 
are often combined in the same person, or rather 
exist alongside one another in him, as a special form 
of that unreconciled conflict between intellect and 
feeling that one finds in Rousseau and his descend- 
ants. As Renan says somewhat inelegantly of him- 
self, one half of his nature made monkey faces at 
the other half. Renan, indeed, was so completely 
[ 128 ] 


- THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


the philologist in all the senses we have defined — 
in language, in history, and in religion—that he 
may come to be looked upon in the future as the best 
representative of the type in the nineteenth century. 
‘At the same time he was an impressionist and dilet- 
tante and —such is the practical complexity of 
human nature — in some respects a humanist, es- 
pecially in his conception of style. From the start 
he was an eminent but also an incurably subjective 
.thinker—a thinker who betrayed the inability of ~ 
_ the Rousseauist to get away from his own tempera- 
ment. And so he gradually lost faith in the serious- 
ness of his own thinking, until at last he allowed 
it to degenerate into a sort of superior intellectual 
: vaudeville. The only thing that he took seriously 
at the end was his contribution to philological fact. 
There is pathos in the slip of paper found on his 
desk after his death, on which he had written that 
the achievement that gave him the most satisfaction 
was his collection of Semitic Inscriptions, the most 
aridly erudite of all his works, the one into which, 
‘humanely speaking, he had put the least of himself. 

Most of our philologists, of course, are not Re- 
nans. The philological discipline is not in itself 


[ 129 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


conducive either to ideas or to the art of expressing 
ideas, and Renan, after all, had both. There often 
exists, however, even in the average philologist, 
along with the scientific method, which is his mas- 
culine side, a feminine or dilettante side. He often 
combines his strict philologizing with that impres- 
Sionism which is only the excess of the sympathetic 
ahd appreciative temper. The judicial and selective 
temper he neither possesses himself nor under- 
stands in others. What he admires next to philo- 
logy is the cleverness of the dilettante, and he some- 
times succeeds in attaining to it himself. 

This curious interplay of philology and impres- 
sionism, sometimes united in the same person, but 
more often existing separately, runs through the 
whole of our language-teaching, but is most visible 
perhaps in the teaching of English. At one extreme 
of the average English department is the philo- 
logical medizevalist, who is grounded in Gothic and 
Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon ; at the other extreme 
is the dilettante, who gives courses in “daily 
themes,” and, like the sophists of old, instructs in- 
genuous youth in the art of expressing itself before 
it has anything to express. 


[ 130 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


The philologists are better organized than the 
dilettantes, and command the approaches to the 
: higher positions through their control of the ma- 
.chinery of the doctor’s degree. The dilettante is 
generally relegated to a subordinate place, and is 
often fitted for it by a pliant and subservient tem- 
per. Indeed, it might not be an exaggeration to 
say that a majority of the more important chairs of 
ancient and modern literature in this country are 
already held by men whose whole preparation and 
achievement have been scientific rather than liter- 
ary. This situation is on the face of it absurd, and 
in some respects even scandalous. Yet the philo- 
logical syndicate can scarcely be blamed for push- 
ing forward men of its own kind; and the problem 
is in itself so difficult that one should sympathize 
with the perplexities of college presidents. The 
young doctor of philosophy has at least submitted to 
the discipline of facts and given evidence of some 
capacity for hard work. The dilettante has usually 
given evidence of nothing, except perhaps a gentle 
epicureanism. ‘Temperamental indolence and an 
aversion to accuracy have been known to disguise 
themselves as a love of literature; so that the 


[131 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


college president is often justified in his prefer- 
ence. 

Yet it is this acceptance of the doctor’s degree 
as proof of fitness for a chair of literature that is 
doing more than any one thing to dehumanize liter- 
ary study and fix on our colleges a philological des- 
potism. The degree as now administered puts a 
premium, not on the man who has read widely and 
thought maturely, but on the man who has shown 
proficiency in research. It thus entourages the 
student to devote the time he still needs for general 
reading and reflection to straining after a premature 
“ originality.” Any plan for rehabilitating the hu- 
manities would therefore seem to turn on the find- 
ing of a substitute for the existing doctorate. What 
is wanted is a training that shall be literary, and at 
the same time free from suspicion of softness or 
- relaxation ; a degree that shall stand for discipline in 
ideas, and not merely for a discipline in facts. Our 
language instruction needs to emphasize more than 
‘it is now doing the relationship between literature 
and thought, if it is to be saved from Alexandrian- 
ism. Alexandria had scholars who were marvels of 
eesthetic refinement, and others who were wonders 


[ 132 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


of philological industry. Yet Alexandrian scholar- 
ship deserves its doubtful repute because of its in- 
ability to vitalize either its estheticism or its philo- 
logy, — because of its failure, on the whole, to make 
any vigorous and virile application of ideas to life. 
The final test of the scholar must be his power to 
penetrate his facts and dominate his impressions, 
and fuse them with the fire of a central purpose 
(ergo vivida vis animi pervicit). What is disquiet- 
ing about our teachers of language is not any want 
of scientific method or zxsthetic appreciativeness, 
but a certain incapacity for ideas. Some of our 
classical scholars have done distinguished work of a 
purely linguistic kind. A number of our scholars 
in the modern field have achieved eminence not 
only in linguistic work, but also in that investiga- 
tion of literary history which passes with many for 
literature itself. But we do not get from our teach- 
ers of the classics any equivalent of such writing 
as that of Professor Butcher in England, or of M. 
Boissier in France — writing that should be almost 
the normal product of a humanistic scholarship ; nor 
do our teachers of modern languages often attain to 
that union of finished form and mature generaliza: 


133 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


tion which is a common occurrence in the French 
doctor’s thesis. 

One of our scholars of German training, evidently 
alarmed at the growing dissatisfaction with the 
present Ph. D., admits that the American thesis 
should try to combine the solidity of German schol- 
arship with the French finish of form. Satisfactory 
doctor’s theses, however, are not to be compounded 
by any such easy recipe. Most German theses, on 
literary subjects, at least, are as flimsy in substance 
as they are crude in form; and finish of form in the 
French thesis has value only in so far as it is 
the outer sign of maturity of substance. One can 
scarcely contemplate the German theses, as they 
pour by hundreds into a large library, without a sort 
of intellectual nausea. American scholarship should 
propose to itself some higher end than simply to 
add a tributary to the stream. 

Hope for literary study in this country would 
seem to lie in questioning the very things that to 
our philologists of German training seem self-evi- 
dent. Thus they assume not only that the chief 
aim of our graduate schools should be to train 
investigators, but that our graduate students have 


[134] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


as a rule a preparation sufficiently broad to justify 
them in embarking at once on their investigations. 
They assume — and this is perhaps the underlying 
assumption of the whole German school — that 
there are two kinds of scholars: the receptive 
scholar, who takes things on authority and is still 
in his intellectual nonage; and the originative 
scholar, who by independent research proves that 
he is intellectually of age. But this is to overlook 
the all-important intermediary stage when the mind 
is neither passively receptive nor again originative, 
but is assimilative in the active and masculine 
sense. It is this oversight which leads to the 
exaggerated estimate of the man who brings for- 
ward new material as compared with the man who 
Os really assimilated the old. Nothing was more 
remarkable about Greek literature than the balance 
it maintained between the forces of tradition and 
the claims of originality," so that Greek literature at 
its best is a kind of creative imitation. It is pre- 
cisely the lack of this creative imitation that is the 
special weakness of our contemporary literature, 


* This point is clearly made in a recent paper by Professor 
H. W. Smyth of Harvard on “ Aspects of Greek Conservatism.” 


[135 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


just as the lack of creative assimilation is the spe- 
cial weakness of our contemporary scholarship. A 
pseudo-originality is equally the bane of both. 

The trouble with most of our imitation of Ger- 
man scholarship is that it has not been creative, 
as all fruitful imitation must be, but servile. We 
should be grateful to the Germans for all we have 
learned from them, but at the same time we should 
not be their dupes. The uncritical adoption of Ger- 
man methods is one of the chief obstacles to a 
humanistic revival. The Germanizing of our classi- 
cal study in particular has been a disaster not only 
to the classics themselves, but to the whole of our 
higher culture. It was not so very long ago that a 
man could win reputation as a classical scholar 
merely by editing some Greek or Latin text with 
notes mainly translated from the German. A feel- 
ing for form and proportion, good taste, measure 
and restraint, judgment and discriminating selection 
— these are the humanistic virtues that should be 
associated with a study of the classics. It can 
scarcely be claimed that these humanistic virtues 
are the ones in which the Germans chiefly excel. 
Dante notes as a special German failing the lack of 


[ 130 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


sobriety. The Germans occasionally display this 
intemperance on the planes of thought and feeling. 
Their prodigality of sentiment we probably all re- 
cognize ; but the German philosophy, the profundity 
of which we admire, is often only a form of the 
libtdo sctendz, the failure to observe the law of mea- 
sure in the matters of the mind; it is often, again, 
only the views of a French writer, Rousseau,’ done 
into obscure and pedantic phraseology. Coleridge 
probably did more than any other person, except 
possibly Carlyle, to instill into English and Ameri- 
cans that exaggerated and superstitious regard for 


* For the relation of Kant to Rousseau see Kuno Fischer, 
Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. I, b. I. cap. xiv; C. 
Dieterich, Kant und Rousseau, etc. R. Fester has treated the 
whole subject from a somewhat special angle inhis Rousseau und 
die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie, It is only fair to remember 
that the immense influence of Rousseau in Germany was largely 
due to the fact that the Germans found in Rousseau a brilliant 
literary expression of what was already latent in themselves. The 
deeper affiliations of Rousseau’s temperament are with Germany 
rather than with England. The book of M. Joseph Texte (/.-./. 
Rousseau et le cosmopolitisme littéraire) has been misleading in this 
respect. The best general account of Rousseau’s German influ- 
ence remains that of H. Hettner in his Lzteraturgeschichte des 
AVILI Jahrhunderts, vol. v. 


[137] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


things German as compared with things French 
which in one form or another has persisted from 
that day to this. Yet even Coleridge admits that 


” 


there is a certain “nimiety’’ about the Germans, 
By this imperfect observance of the law of measure 
the Germans betray the fact that they are a people 
still young in civilization. Scientific method and im- 
mense erudition they have acquired, and they have 
always had abundant enthusiasm. But it is easier 
to be scientific or erudite or enthusiastic than civil- 
ized. Of course we ourselves, in some respects, do 
not differ from the Germans, but for that very reason 
we should gain more, perhaps, from models whose 
virtues and failings are not so much like our own. 
The French are very far from faultless, yet French 
life is more complementary to our life than that of 
the Germans, and contact with it is therefore more 
likely to lead to the completing and rounding out of 
ourselves that the humanist desires. 

In the matter of the doctor’s degree especially 
our practice might at least have been tempered by 
hints from England and France, both of them coun- 
tries with older literary traditions than Germany. 
For instance, a First Class at Oxford has little in 


[ 138 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


common with our undergraduate honors, but offers 
a training comparable in difficulty to that of the 
doctorate. This training, however, is of an entirely 
different kind; it is at once a test of humane assim- 
ilation, and a discipline in thoroughness and accu- 
racy. The Frenchman, again, who has gained in the 
lycée the educational equivalent of the gymnasium, 
cannot, like the German, proceed at once to spe- 
cialize ; he must in all cases receive the /cence and 
in nearly all cases actually does receive the agréga- 
tion — involving years of assimilative work — be- 
fore he arrives at his special investigation. Even 
with these restrictions, Sainte-Beuve, himself one of 
the greatest and most accurate of investigators, com- 
plained of the harm done to humane letters in 
France by an undue emphasis on “ originality ” and 
research. In our own time, the same complaint has 
been repeated with less amenity by Brunetiéere. As 
Sainte-Beuve says, ‘‘ L’ére des scholiastes et com- 
mentateurs se rouvre et recommence.” Sainte- 
Beuve’s prophecies of a new Alexandrianism are 
justified by the poverty of real intellectual achieve- 
ment on the part of our modern language teachers 
as compared with their eager interest in such sub- 


[ 139 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


jects as the making of concordances, dialect-study, 
and spelling reform. 

Our inferiority in literary scholarship might be 
remedied in some measure if it were led up to and 
encouraged with us, as it is in France and Eng- 
land, by an appropriate degree. Such distinctions 
as a First Class in an Oxford honor school or 
the French agrégatzon would not in themselves be 
suited to our needs; but they at least illustrate 
how a degree that stands primarily for reading and 
assimilation may be made as severe and searching 
as a degree that stands primarily for research. If 
the general principle of such a degree were once 
accepted, its details could easily be adapted to our 
special requirements. Perhaps the desired end could 
best be accomplished by a comprehensive plan for 
graduate and undergraduate honors in literature. 
Graduate honors could be used to give the degree 
of A. M. the meaning it has hitherto lacked, and 
undergraduate honors to help restore to the degree 
of A.B. the meaning it is so rapidly losing. Gradu- 
ate honors should not take more than two years,. 
and should hardly attempt to cover more than a 
single literature ; but in that case they ought ordi- 


[ 140 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


narily to presuppose undergraduate honors, which, 
like the new honors in literature at Harvard, cor- 
relate the ancient and modern fields. 

Who can doubt that a teacher of French who 
had thus widely read in the ancient and modern 
classics would be of more use to the average col- 
lege than the man who had demonstrated his “ orig- 
inality ” by collecting examples of the preposition 
in Old French from Godefroy’s Dictionary? Or that 
the classical scholar who knew his Plato and Aris- 
totle both in themselves and in their relation to the 
humane tradition of the world would do more to 
advance his subject than the man who had devoted 
painful vigils to writing a thesis on the Uses of 
dum, donec, and quoad ? The successful honor can- 
didate would, like the French agrégé and unlike the 
American doctor, have been prepared directly for 
the work he would normally be expected to do; 
and then, if he had a gift for research, he could, 
like the agrégé, cultivate this gift at leisure and 
at last publish something that might compare in 
maturity with the French doctoral dissertation. 
Students at the age at which they ordinarily attend 
the graduate school may attain to scientific method ; 


[14 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


they may become distinguished fact-collectors either 
in the line of linguistic work pure and simple or 
in the line of historical research ; but the maturity 
of judgment that can alone give value to literary 
scholarship comes, as Longinus has said, if it 
comes at all, only as the crowning fruit of long 
experience. Students with literary tastes should 
not be encouraged to sacrifice to the fetish of pro- 
ductive scholarship the time they still need for 
assimilation. 

The new degree that we propose, though putting 
a diminished emphasis on research, should rest its 
discipline in ideas on a solid discipline in facts. 
Language should be thoroughly mastered both lin- 
guistically and as a medium for the adequate and 
artistic expression of thought. To attempt to train 
in ideas students who have received no previous 
discipline, not even the discipline of common accu- 
racy, is to expect them to fly before they have 
learned to walk. It will probably be easy enough 
to start a reaction against the present methods of 
our philologists, but this movement of protest will 
prove worse than useless if it is simply to turn to 


the profit of the dilettante. The natural tendency 
[ 142 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


of the philologists themselves when goaded beyond 
a certain point by their critics is to promote a few 
dilettantes to college positions as a sort of sop 
to the literary element. If the philologist has to 
choose between a humanist and a dilettante, he is 
likely to prefer the latter, moved perhaps by an 
obscure instinct of self-preservation, but even more 
by that secret alliance which we have already noted 
between his own nature and that of the dilettante. 
In fact, the danger just now is greater from the 
dilettante than from the philologist, provided we 
include the dilettanteism of the philologist himself. 
There has been a decrease of late in scientific dog- 
matism, that dogmatism of the nineteenth century 
which was often as profound and unconscious as 
that of medizeval theology. The arrogance of the 
philologist is bound to diminish, and indeed is al- 
ready diminishing, with that of the scientist. One 
can even now observe in the philologist who has 
“arrived’’ an increasing anxiety to assume a lit- 
erary pose. His friends talk with bated breath of 
his literary sense. He not only convinces himself 
and his fr*znds, but college presidents, that he is 
“literary.” Indeed, if the abuse of the word lit- 


[ 143 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


erary continues at the present rate, one will soon 
have to abandon the word entirely to the dilettante 
and the philologist in his dilettante moods. It is 
only just to the philologist to admit that his way 
of giving courses in literature is often a rather con- 
vincing substitute for a genuinely humanistic treat- 
ment. As Sainte-Beuve phrases it, when seen from 
a distance, and from behind, and by moonlight, the 
literary philologist and the humanist might almost 
be mistaken for one another. The philologist profits 
by the common failure to distinguish between lit- 
erature and literary history. And then, too, he often 
has that enthusiastic and appreciative temper which 
is not only easier to attain than the judicial attitude, 
but also more popular. He usually betrays himself, — 
however, when he tries to handle general ideas and 
especially to relate these ideas to something higher 
than his own temperament. 

The humanist who at present enters college 
teaching should not underestimate the difficulties 
he is likely to encounter. He will find a literature 
ancient and modern controlled by a philological 
syndicate, a history dehumanized by the abuse of 
scientific method, and a political economy that has 


[ 144 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


never been humane.’ Under these circumstances 
the humanist will have to undertake the task that 
Wordsworth so modestly proposed to himself, that 
of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. 
He will be more or less out of touch with his col- 
leagues; and, though he will attract some students 
of the more serious sort, will not necessarily win 
wide and sudden popularity among undergraduates. 
As a result of long practice, from the kindergarten 
up, the American undergraduate has often acquired 
a remarkable dexterity in dodging every kind of 
discipline. If he takes a course given in a human- 
istic spirit, he is likely to have exacted from him a 
good part of the philological discipline in facts, and 
an additional discipline in ideas with which the phil- 
ologist is generally not overmuch concerned. It is 


1 From the outset the orthodox political economy has been 
humanitarian rather than humane. The end of man, as it views 
him, is not the attainment of wisdom but the production of wealth. 
It therefore tends to reduce everything to terms of quantity and 
power and, as an offset, resorts to various mixtures of altruistic 
sympathy and “ enlightened self-interest.” Everything of course 
depends on the individual teacher. Political economy taught by 
a Walter Bagehot would be more humane than Plato as taught 


by many of our American classicists. 


[145] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


not surprising that many students should prefer the 
kind of course given by the dilettante who is less 
preoccupied with the whole question of discipline, 
and so freer to devote himself to being clever and 
entertaining. A man of ideas once said in my pre- 
sence that intellect will tell in the long run — even 
in a college faculty. In the meanwhile he himself 
resigned a college position and took up another 
occupation in the evident fear that otherwise he 
might suffer the fate of Dryden’s Achitophel : — 
* Yet still he saw his fortune at a stay — 

Whole droves of blockheads choking up his way.” 
Academic recognition is likely to come at present 
not to the man of ideas, but to the man who can 
present the most plausible mixture of philology and 
impressionism. It requires courage to prefer to what 
is so plainly the “way to promotion and pay” the 
difficult and unpopular task of thinking. 

We should, however, be charitable to the phil- 
ologists, and grant that the difficulty with them is 
not so much a deliberate hostility to ideas as a sheer 
inability to recognize ideas when they see them. 
This inability explains as much as any one thing 
the condition into which our classical departments 


[ 146 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


have fallen. A committee which recently investi- 
gated one of our Eastern colleges reported that the 
courses in the classics were mainly taken by “ grinds” 
as a part of their professional training for teaching, 
whereas the courses in political economy were taken 
by large numbers of undergraduates for the purposes 
of general culture. Our classical professors are 
prone to look upon themselves as the victims of 
manifest destiny and inevitable tendencies; and it 
is true that classical studies have a formidable foe 
in the very spirit of the age. But that this foe is 
not insuperable is shown by the prompt response 
of our public to classical lecturers like Professors 
Butcher and Murray, who are at the same time men 
of ideas. The English humanism, as I have tried to 
show elsewhere, does not exactly meet our present 
needs. Yet rather than suffer indefinitely from the 
German incubus, we had better try to induce some 
of the best of the Oxford honor men to come to 
this country as teachers of the classics. An occa- 
sional returning Rhodes scholar may also be of some 
use. A man with Oxford training is at least likely 
to know something of his Plato and Aristotle, and 
that is already a great deal. 


[147 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


With more liberal methods we may hope in time 
to get more American students, and of a stronger 
type, to go into the classics. I have known first- 
class men in both the ancient and the modern field 
who have been literally driven away in disgust by 
the present requirements for the Ph. D. I have 
known others who have accepted these requirements, 
but in bitterness of spirit. The wail of the dilettante 
who lacks backbone to acquire the philological dis- 
cipline we can afford to neglect. The case is more 
serious, however, when the student humanistically 
inclined is likewise repelled from a career of literary 
teaching by the barbed-wire entanglements with 
which our philologists have obstructed its entrance. 

Herein lies the justification of the new degree, or 
at least of a radical revision of the requirements for 
the existing degree. The problem, of course, is not 
so much to devise some new form of academic 
machinery as to change the spirit which is respons- 
ible for the present superstition of the doctor’s 
degree. This will be a necessary preliminary to the 
liberalizing of our study of either the ancient or 
modern languages. But though we must have the 
spirit first of all, we must not be neglectful of our 


[ 148 ] 


THE DOCTOR’S DEGREE 


methods. It already savors of the dilettante to have 
too fine a scorn for questions of method. Right 
methods without strong men and strong men with- 
out right methods are equally unavailing. Taken 
individually and apart from their methods our clas- 
sical scholars are probably as able a body of men as 
will be found in any other department. 

For thes: and other reasons, then, a new degree 
would scum to be required as an alternative, if not 
a substitute, for the present Ph. D.; a degree that 
would lay due stress on esthetic appreciativeness 
and linguistic accuracy, but would insist above all 
on wide reading and the power to relate this read- 
ing so as to form the foundation for a disciplined 
judgment. There would then be some hope of our 
having humanists as well as philologists and dilet- 
tantes, and our literary instruction would be safe- 
guarded from the dry rot of Alexandrianism. 


VI 


THE RATIONAL STUDY OF THE 
CLASSIC=e 


DEAN SwiIFT, in his description of tke battle be- 
tween the ancient and modern books in the king’s 
library, has very wisely refrained from iclling the 
outcome of the encounter. The conflict is not even 
yet fought toa finish, but the advantage is more 
and more on the side of the moderns. By its uncon- 
scious drift not less than by its conscious choice of 
direction, the world seems to be moving away from 
the classics. The modern mind, as the number of 
subjects that solicit attention increases, tends, by 
an instinct of self-preservation, to reject everything 
that has even the appearance of being non-essential. 

If, then, the teacher of the classics is thus put 
on the defensive, the question arises how far his 


* It might be well to point out that this essay was written in 1896, 
from six to eleven years before the other essays in the volume, 
and refers in places to conditions that have since undergone some 


change. 


[ 150 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


position is inevitable, and how far it springs from a 
failure to conform his methods to existing needs. 
Present methods of classical teaching reflect the 
change that has taken place during the past thirty 
years in our whole higher education. This period 
has seen the rise of graduate schools organized with 
a view to the training of specialists on the German 
plan, and superimposed on undergraduate systems 
belonging to an entirely different tradition. The 
establishment of the first of these graduate schools, 
that of the Johns Hopkins University, and the 
impulse there given to work of the type leading to 
the German doctor’s degree, is an event of capital 
importance in American educational history. Presi- 
dent Gilman contemplated with something akin to 
enthusiasm the introduction of the German scienti- 
fic spirit, of strengwessenschaftliche Methode, the in- / 
stinct for research and original work, into the intel- 
lectual life of the American student. The results 
have more than justified his expectations. In all that 
relates to accurate grasp of the subject in hand, to 
strenuous application and mastery of detail, the stand- 
ard of American scholarship has risen immensely 
during the last few years, and will continue to rise. 


[151] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Our universities are turning out a race of patient 
and laborious investigators, who may claim to have 
rivaled the Germans on their own ground, as Horace 
said the Romans had come to rival the Greeks : — 
“ Venimus ad summum fortunae; pingimus atque 
Psallimus et luctamur Achivis doctius unctis.” 

There are, however, even among those who 
recognize the benefits of the German scientific 
spirit, many who feel at the same time its dangers 
and drawbacks. A reaction is beginning against a 
too crude application of German methods to Amer- 
ican educational needs. There are persons at pre- 
sent who do not believe that a man is fitted to fill 
a chair of French literature in an American college 
simply because he has made a critical study of the 
text of a dozen medizeval beast fables and written 
a thesis on the Picard dialect, and who deny thata 
man is necessarily qualified to interpret the human- 
ities to American undergraduates because he has 
composed a dissertation on the use of the present 
participle in Ammianus Marcellinus. It is held by 
others, who put the matter on broader grounds, 
that German science is beginning to show signs of 
a decadence similar to the decadence that overtook 


[ 152 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


Greek science in the schools of Alexandria. Mat- 4, 
thew Arnold declares the great Anglo-Saxon fail- ; 
ing during“the present century to have been. an 
excessive faith in machinery and material appli- 
ances. May we not with equal truth say that the 
great German failing during the same period has 
been an excessive faith in intellectual machinery 
and intellectual appliances? What else but intel- 
lectual machinery is that immense mass of partial 
results which has grown out of the tendency of 
modern science to an ever minuter subdivision and 
analysis? The heaping up of volumes of special 
research and of investigations of infinitesimal detail 
has kept pace in Germany with the multiplication of 1“ 
mechanical contrivances in the Anglo-Saxon world. / 
One sometimes asks in moments of despondency 
whether the main achievement of the nineteenth 

century will not have been to accumulate a mass 

of machinery that will break the twentieth cen- 

tury’s back. The Cornell University library already oe 
contains, for the special study of Dante alone, 

over seven thousand volumes; about three fourths 

of which, it may be remarked in passing, are 


nearly or quite worthless, and only tend to the 


[153] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


confusion of good counsel. Merely to master the 
special apparatus for the study of Dante and his 
times, the student, if he conforms to the standard 
set for the modern specialist, will run the risk of 
losing his intellectual symmetry and sense of pro- 
portion, precisely the qualities of which he will 
stand most in need for the higher interpretation of 
Dante. 

Nowhere, perhaps, is this disposition to forget 
the end of knowledge in the pursuit of its means 
and appliances more apparent than in the study of 
the classics. There is no intention, in saying this, 
to underrate the services that nineteenth-century 
scholars, especially those of Germany, have ren- 
dered the cause of classical learning. In their philo- 
logical research and minute criticism of texts they 
are only following a method which, though first 
formulated and systematically applied by Bentley, 
goes back in its main features to the great scholars 
of the Renaissance. Is there not, however, a fal- 
lacy in assuming that material so strictly limited in 
amount as that remaining to us from classical anti- 
quity is forever to be primarily the subject of sci- 
entific investigation ? The feudal institutions which 


[154 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


saved France from anarchy during the Middle 
Ages had come, in the eighteenth century, to be 
the worst of anachronisms ; and in like manner the ; 
type of scholarship which was needed at the begin-)/ 
ning of the Renaissance to rescue and restore the / 
texts of the classical writers will come to be a no 
less flagrant anachronism if persisted in after that 
work has been thoroughly done. The method which 

in the sixteenth century produced a Stephanus or 

a Casaubon will only give us to-day the spectacle 
of the “ German doctor desperate with the task of / 
saying something where everything has been said,” 
and eager to apply his new theory of fog as an 
illuminating medium.” As the field of ancient 
literature is more and more completely covered, the 
vision of the special investigator must become more 
and more microscopic. The present generation of 
classical philologists, indeed, reminds one of a cer- 
tain sect of Japanese Buddhists which believes that 
salvation is to be attained by arriving at a know- 
ledge of the infinitely small. Men have recently 
shown their fitness for teaching the humanities by 
writing theses on the ancient horse-bridle and the 
Roman doorknob. 


[155] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Doubtless the time has not yet come for what 
may be called the age of research in the ancient 
languages to be finally brought to a close. Of 
Greek literature especially we may say, in the 
words of La Fontaine, “That is a field which 
cannot be so harvested that there will not be some- 
thing left for the latest comer to glean.” But 
while there may still be subjects of research in the 
classics that will reward the advanced student, it is 
doubtful whether there are many such whose study 
the beginner may profitably undertake as a part of 
his preparation in his specialty. In doing the work 
necessary under existing conditions to obtain the 
doctor’s degree in the classics, it may be questioned 
whether a man has chosen the best means of get- 
ting at the spirit, or even the letter, of ancient 
literature, or of qualifying himself to become an 
exponent of that literature to others. It is claimed 
by the advocates of research that the training the 
student gets in his investigation, even though he 
fail to arrive at any important result, is in itself 
valuable and formative to a high degree. He is 
at least initiated into that strengwissenschaftliche 
Methode on which President Gilman lays such par- 


[ 156 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


ticular stress. We must recognize a large measure 
‘ef truth in the claims thus put forward by the ad- 
vocates of research. It is by his power to gather 
himself together, to work within limits, as Goethe 
has told us in a well-known phrase, that the master 
is first revealed. In so far, then, as the German 
scientific method forces us to gather ourselves 
together and to work within limits, thereby increas- 
ing our power of concentration, our ability to lay 
firm hold upon the specific fact, we cannot esteem 
it too highly. There can be no more salutary dis- 
cipline for a person who is afflicted with what may 
be termed a loose literary habit of mind than to be 
put through a course of exact research. The lack of 
the power to work within limits, to lay firm hold 
upon the specific fact, isa fault of the gravest char- 
acter, even when it appears in a mind like that of 
Emerson. 

The question arises, however, whether an unduly 
high price has not been paid for accuracy and sci- 
entific method when these qualities have been ob- 
tained at the sacrifice of breadth. Would it not be 
possible to devise a series of examinations, some- 


what similar in character, perhaps, to those now 


[157] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


held for honors at Oxford and Cambridge, — exam- 
inations which would touch upon ancient life and 
literature at the largest possible number of points, 
and which might serve to reveal, as the writing of 
a doctor’s thesis does not, the range as well as the 
exactness of a student’s knowledge? Some test is 
certainly needed which shall go to show the general 
culture of a candidate as well as his special profi- 
ciency, his familiarity with ideas as well as with 
words, and his mastery of the spirit, as well as of 
the mechanism, of the ancient languages. 

It is precisely in the failure to distinguish between 
the spirit and the mechanism of language, in the un- 
willingness to recognize literature as having claims 
apart from philology, that the danger of the present 
tendency chiefly consists. The opinion seems to be 
gaining ground that the study of literature by itself 
is unprofitable, hard to disassociate from dilettante- 
ism, and not likely to lead to much except a lavish 
outlay of elegant epithets of admiration. A profes- 
sor of Greek in one of the Eastern colleges is re- 
ported to have said that the literary teaching of the 
classics would reduce itself in practice to ringing 
the changes on the adjective “beautiful!’”’ It is 


[158] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


rigorous scientific method, we are told, that needs 
to be painfully acquired. If a man has a certain 
right native instinct, his appreciation of the litera- 
ture will take care of itself; and if this native 
instinct is lacking, it is something that no pres- 
sure from without will avail to produce. It is, then, 
strengwissenschaftliche Methode with its talismanic 
virtues that our every effort should be directed to 
impart, whereas the taste for literature is to be 
reckoned in with Dogberry’s list of things that 
come by nature. It is in virtue of some such senti- 
ment as this that the study of philology seems at 
present to be driving the study of literature more 
and more from our Eastern universities. Do not the 
holders of this view, we may ask, emphasize unduly 
the influence their method will have upon individ- 
uals, and at the same time fail to consider the effect 
it may have in the formation of a tendency? In the 
long run the gradual working of any given ideal 
upon the large body of average men, who simply 
take on the color of their environment, will produce 
a well-nigh irresistible movement in the direction of 
that ideal. If the minutiz rather than the larger as- 
pects of the classics are insisted upon, the taste for 


[159] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


small things will spread like a contagion among the 
rank and file of classical scholars, and we shall soon 
be threatened with an epidemic of pedantry. A par- 
ticular type of scholar is as much in need of a con- 
genial atmosphere in which to flourish as a plant is 
in need of a congenial soil and climate in which to 
flower and bring forth fruit. We cannot readily im- 
agine a Professor Jowett appearing under existing 
conditions at the University of Berlin. Besides, the 
danger is to be taken into account that if present 
methods are pushed much further, the young men 
with the right native instinct for literature are likely 
to be driven out of the classics entirely. Young 
men of this type may not all care to be educated as 
though they were to be “ editors, and not lovers of 
polite literature ;”’ they may not feel the fascina- 
tion of spending months in a classical seminary, 
learning how to torment the text and the meaning 
of a few odes of Horace, — 
‘“‘ And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.” 

There is, to be sure, a very real danger in some 
subjects, especially in_English literature, that the 
instruction may take too belletristic a turn, The 


term “culture course” has come to mean, among 
[ 160 | 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


the undergraduates of one of our Eastern colleges, 
a course in which the students are not required to 
do any work. It is one of the main advantages of 
Latin and Greek over modern languages that the 
mere mastering of an ancient author’s meaning will 
give to a course enough bone and sinew of solid 
intellectual effort to justify the teacher in adding 
thereto the flesh and blood of a literary interpreta- 
tion. Ina civilization so hard and positive in temper 
as our own, it is not the instinct for philology, but 
rather the instinct for literature and for the things of 
the imagination, which is likely to remain latent if 
left to itself. A certain dry, lexicographical habit of 
mind is said by Europeans to be the distinctive mark 
of American scholarship. Instead of fostering this 
habit of mind in the study of the classics by an 
undue insistence on philology, it should be our en- 
deavor to counteract it by giving abundant stimulus 
and encouragement to the study of them as literature. 
In the classics more than in other subjects, the fact 
should never be forgotten that the aim proposed is 
the assimilation, and not the accumulation, of know- 
ledge. In the classics, if nowhere else, mere eru- 
dition should be held in comparatively little account 


[ 161 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


except in so far as it has been converted into cul- 
ture; and culture itself should not be regarded as 
complete until it has so penetrated its possessor as 
to become a part of his character. Montaigne has — 
said somewhere in his essays that he loved to forge 
his mind rather than to furnish it. The metaphor 
of Montaigne’s phrase is somewhat mixed, but the 
idea it embodies is one that men born into a late 
age of scholarship cannot ponder too carefully. As 
the body of learning transmitted from the past in- 
creases in volume, it becomes constantly more diffi- 
cult to maintain that exact relation between the 
receipt and the assimilation of knowledge which has 
been declared by the greatest of the Hindu sages to 
be the root of all wisdom. “ Without knowledge,” 
says Buddha, “ there is no reflection, without reflec- 
tion there is no knowledge ; he who has both know- 
ledge and reflection is close upon Nirvana.” 

The risk we run nowadays is that of having our 
minds buried beneath a dead-weight of informa- 
tion. which we have no inner energy, no power of 
reflection, to appropriate to our own uses.and con- 





guard against allowing the mere collector of in- 
[ 162 | 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


formation to gain an undue advantage over the man 
who would maintain some balance between _ his 
knowledge and_ reflection. We are, for instance, 
putting a premium on pedantry, if we set up as the 
sole test of proficiency in the classics the degree of 
familiarity shown with that immense machinery of 
minute learning that has grown up about them. 
This is to exalt that mere passive intellectual feed- 
ing which is the bane of modern scholarship. It is 


to encourage the man who is willing to abandon all 


attempt at native and spontaneous thought, and be- Y 


come a mere register and repertory of other men’s oe 


ideas in some small department of knowledge. The 
man who is willing to reduce his mind to a purely 
mechanical function may often thereby gain a mas- 
tery of facts that will enable him to intimidate the 
man who would make a larger use of his knowledge ; 
for there are among scholars, as Holmes says there 
are in society, ‘fellows’? who have a number of 
“ill-conditioned facts which they lead after them into 
decent company, ready to let them slip, like so many 
bulldogs, at every ingenious suggestion or conven- 
ient generalization or pleasant fancy.’’ There has 
always existed between the man of the literal fact 


[ 163 ] 


/ 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


and the man of the general law, between the man 
of cold understanding and the man of thought and 
imagination, an instinctive aversion. We can trace 
the feud that has divided the two classes of minds 
throughout history. They were arrayed against each 
other in fierce debate for centuries during the 
Middle Ages under the name of Realists and Nomi- 
nalists. The author of one of the oldest of the 
Hindu sacred books pronounces an anathema on two 
classes of people, the grammarian and the man who 
is over-fond of a good dinner, and debars them both 
from the hope of final salvation. 

The remark has frequently been made that quar- 
rels would not last long if the fault were on one 
side only. We may apply this truth to the debate 
in question, which, considered in its essence, springs 
from the opposition between the lovers of synthesis 
and the lovers of analysis. Now, Emerson has pro- 
foundly said, in his essay on Plato, that the main 
merit of the Greeks was to have found and occupied 
the right middle ground between synthesis and 
analysis; and this will continue to be the aim of 
the true scholar. 

The old humanism, such as it still survives at 


[ 164 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


Oxford, has in it much that is admirable; but it has 
become, in some respects at least, antiquated and 
inadequate. It would sometimes seem to lead, as it 
did in the case of Walter Pater, to an ultra-zsthetic 
and epicurean attitude toward life — to a disposition 
to retire into one’s ivory tower, and seek in ancient 
literature merely a source of exquisite solace. The 
main fault of this English humanism, however, is 
that it treats the classical writers too much as iso- 
lated phenomena; it fails to relate them in a broad 
and vital way to modern life. It would seem, then, 
that new life and interest are to be infused into the 
classics not so much by a restoration of the old hu- 
manism as by a larger application to them of the 
comparative and historical methods. These meth- 
ods, we hasten to add, should be informed with ideas 
and reinforced by a sense of absolute values. Espe- 
cially in the case of a language like Latin, whose 
literature is so purely derivative, and which has in 
turn radiated its influence along so many different 
lines to the modern world, any mere disconnected 
treatment of individual authors is entirely insuff- 
cient. The works of each author, indeed, should first 
~ be considered by themselves and on their own merits, 


[ 165 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


but they should also be studied as links in that 
unbroken chain of literary and intellectual tradition 
which extends from the ancient to the modern world. 

It is by bringing home to the mind of the Ameri- 
can student the continuity of this tradition that one 
is likely to implant in him, more e effectually, per- 
haps, than in any other way, that right feeling 
and respect for the past which he so signally 
lacks. For if the fault of other countries and other 
times has been an excess of reverence for the 
past, the danger of this country to-day would seem 
rather to be an undue absorption in the present. 
No great monument of a former age, no Pan- 
theon or Notre Dame, rises in the midst of our 
American cities to make a silent plea for the past 
against the cheap and noisy tendencies of the pass- 
ing hour. From various elements working together 
obscurely in his consciousness — from the theory of 
human perfectibility inherited from the eighteenth 
century, from the more recent doctrine of evolution, 
above all from the object lesson of his own national 
life — the average American has come to have an 
instinctive belief that each decade is a gain over the 
last decade, and that each century is an improve- 


[ 166 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


ment on its predecessor ; the first step he has to gw/so 


take in the path of culture is to realize that move- 


advance in civilization cannot be measured by the 
\/s 


increase in the number of eighteen-story buildings. 
The emancipation from this servitude to the pre- 
sent may be reckoned as one of the chief benefits to 
be derived from classical study. Unfortunately this 
superficial modernism turns many away from the 
study of the classics altogether, and tends to dimin- 
ish, even in those who do study them, that faith 
and enthusiasm so necessary to overcome the initial 
difficulties. 

The American, it is true, is often haunted, in the 
midst of all his surface activity, with a vague sense 
that, after all, his life may be deficient in depth and 
dignity ; it is not so often, however, that he suc- 
ceeds in tracing this defect in his life to its lack of 
background and perspective, to the absence in him- 
self of a right feeling for the past, — that feeling 
which, as has been truly said, distinguishes more 
than any other the civilized man from the barbarian. 
As has already been remarked, this feeling is to be 
gained, in the case of the classics, not so much by 


[ 167 ] 


A 


jrle ine 12 Pm 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


treating them as isolated phenomena as by making 
clear the manifold_ways in which they are related 
to the present, by leaving no chasm between an- 
cient and modern life over which the mind is unable 
to pass. One of the important functions, then, of 
the classical teacher should be to bridge over the 
gap between the Greek and Roman world and the 
world of to- day. No preparation can be too broad, 

no culture too comprehensive, for the man who 
would fit himself for the adequate performance of 
such a task. His knowledge of modern life and lit- 
erature needs to be almost as wide as his knowledge 
of the life and literature of antiquity. The ideal 
student of the classics should not rest satisfied until 
he is able to follow out in all its ramifications that 
Greek and Latin thought which, as Max Miler 
says, runs like fire in the veins of modern literature. 





In the case of an author like Virgil, for instance, 
he should be familiar not only with the classical 
Virgil, but also with the Virgil of after-centuries, 
—with Virgil the magician and enchanter who 
haunted the imagination of the Middle Ages, with 
Virgil the guide of Dante, and so on, down to the 
splendid ode of Tennyson. If he is dealing with 


[ 168 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY, OF THE CLASSICS 


Aristotle, he should be able to show the immense 
influence exercised by Aristotle over the medizeval 
and modern European mind, both directly through 
the Latin tradition and indirectly through Aver- 
rhoés and the Arabs. If his author is Euripides, he 
should know in what way Euripides has affected 
modern dramatic art; he should be capable of 
making a comparison between the “ Hippolytus” 
and the “ Phedre” of Racine. If he is studying 
Stoicism, he should be able to contrast the stoical 
ideal of perfection with the Christian ideal of the per- 
fect life as elaborated by writers like St. Bonaven- 
tura and St. Thomas Aquinas. He should neglect far 
less than has been done heretofore the great patris- 
tic literature in Greek and Latin, as giving evidence 
of the process by which ancient thought passed over 
into thought of the medizeval and modern types. 
These are only a few examples, chosen almost at 
random, of the wide and fruitful application that 
may be made of the comparative method. 

How much, again, might be done to enhance 
the value of classical study by a freer use than has 
hitherto been made of the historical method! The 
word “ historical’’ is intended to be taken in a large 


[ 169 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


sense ; what is meant is not so much a mere cata- | 
loguing of the events of ancient civilization as an 
investigation of the various causes that led to the 
greatness or decline of ancient societies. The last 
word on the reasons for the rise and fall of the 
Romans has not been spoken by Montesquieu. An 
investigation of the kind referred to would allow the 
application of many of the theories of modern sci- 
ence, but its results would have far more than an 
abstract scientific interest; they would provide us 
with instruction and examples to meet the problems 
of our own times. [rom the merest inattention to 
the teachings of the past, we are likely, in our na- 
tional life, to proceed cheerfully to 
“ Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways.” 
A sober reflection on the history of the ancient 
republics might put us on our guard against many 
of the dangers to which we ourselves are exposed. 
It might cure us in part of our cheap optimism. It 
might, in any case, make us conscious of that ten- 
dency of which Macchiavelli had so clear a vision, — 
the tendency of a state to slip down an easy slope of 
prosperity into vice :— 3 
“Et in vitium fortuna labier aequa.” 


[ 170 ] 


BALIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 
How much light might be shed —to give but a 


single illustration of what is meant — on contempo- 
rary as well as on Roman politics by a course, pro- 
perly conducted, on the correspondence of Cicero! 
The method just suggested of studying the clas- 
sics might possibly render them less liable to the 
complaint now made that they are entirely remote 
from the interests and needs of the present. It is 
this feeling of the obsoleteness of the classics, joined 
to the utilitarian instinct so deeply imbedded in the 
American character, that is creating such a wide- 
spread sentiment in favor of giving the place they 
now hold to modern languages. The American stu- 
dent of the future is evidently going to have a chance 
to follow in the footsteps of that remarkable young 
woman, Miss Blanche Amory of ‘“ Pendennis,” who, 
it will be remembered, ‘improved her mind bya 
sedulous study of the novels of the great modern 
authors of the French language.” It would appear, 
from a comparison of the catalogues of one of our 
Eastern universities, that its undergraduates now 
have an opportunity to read “ La Débacle” of Emile 
Zola, where twenty years ago they would have been 
required to read the “ Antigone” of Sophocles. 


Nyce 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


We will not attempt for the present a full discus- 
sion of this important question as to the relative 
educational value of ancient and modern languages, 
but a few reasons may be given briefly in support 
of the view that modern languages, however valu- 
able as a study supplementary to the classics, are 
quite inadequate to take their place. | 

M. Paul Bourget, in a recent autobiographical 
sketch, tells us that, as a young man, he steeped 
his mind in the works of Stendhal and Baudelaire 
and other modern literature of the same type. He 
fails to explain, either to himself or others, the fact 
that these modern books, though written, as he 
says, in all truth and sincerity, should yet have 
given him a view of life which later led only to 
bitter disappointment and disillusion. M. Bourget’s 
difficulty might have been less if he had taken into 
account that the authors of whom he speaks, so far 
from serving as a stimulus to his will and reason, 
merely invited him to retire into a corner and try 
strange experiments on his own emotional nature, 
and draw new and novel effects from his own ca- 
pacity for sensation; that they held out to him, in 

uy short, the promise of a purely personal and sensu- 


[172 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


ous satisfaction from life, a promise which life 
itself may be counted upon not to keep. Now 
modern authors are not all, like Baudelaire, of the 
violently subjective type, but the intrusion of the 
author and his foibles into his work, the distortion 
of the objective reality of life by its passage through © 
the personal medium, is much more frequent in 
modern than in ancient literature. Much of modern 
literature merely encourages to sentimental and ro- 
mantic revery rather than to a resolute and manly 
grappling with the plain facts of existence. Roman- 
ticism may not mean the Commune, as Thiers said 
it did, but we may at least say that literature of the 
romantic type, compared with that in the classical 
tradition, is so deficient in certain qualities of sobri- 
ety and discipline as to make us doubt its value as 
a formative influence upon the minds of the young. 
Classical literature, at its best, does not so much tend \y 
to induce in us acertain state of feelings, much less 

a certain state of the nerves; it appeals rather to 
our higher reason and imagination —to those fac- 
ulties which afford us an avenue of escape from 
ourselves, and enable us to become participants in 
the universal life. It is thus truly educative in that ~‘ 


[173] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


it leads him who studies it out and away from him- 
self. The classical spirit, in its purest form, feels it- 
self consecrated to the service of a high, impersonal 
reason. Hence its sentiment of restraint and disci- 
pline, its sense of proportion and pervading law. By 
bringing our acts into an ever closer conformity with 
this high, impersonal reason, it would lead us, al- 
though along a different path, to the same goal as 
religion, to a union ever more intimate with 
“ our only true, deep-buried selves, 
Being one with which we are one with the whole world.” 
By a complete and harmonious development of all 
our faculties under the guidance and control of this 
right reason, it would raise us above the possibility 
of ever again falling away 
“Into some bondage of the flesh or mind, 
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze 
Forged by the imperious, lonely thinking power.” 

This high message contained in classical litera- 
ture calls for the active exercise of our own best 
faculties, of our intellect and imagination, in order 
to be understood. It may be because of this purely 
intellectual appeal of the classics that there is so 


much initial inertia to overcome in awakening an 


[174] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


interest in them. Indeed, to transform into a Greek 
scholar the average young man of to-day, whose 
power of attention has been dissipated in the pages 
of the American newspaper, whose mind has been 
relaxed by reading the modern erotic novel, — this, 
to borrow one of Phillips Brooks’s phrases, would 
sometimes seem about as promising an enterprise 
as to make a lancehead out of putty. The number 
of those who can receive the higher lessons of Greek 
culture is always likely to be small. The classical 
spirit, however, is salutary and formative wherever 
it occurs, and if a man is not able to appreciate it 
in Pindar, he may in Horace; and if not in Horace, 
then in Moliére. French literature of the seven- 
teenth century is, as a whole, the most brilliant 
manifestation of the classical spirit in modern times, 
and one might teach French with considerable con- 
viction, were it not for the propensity of the Ameri- 
can student to confine his reading in French to in- 
ferior modern authors, and often, indeed, to novels 
of the decadence. 

Decadent novels and other fungous growths of a 
similar nature are not peculiar to French, but are 


multiplying with alarming rapidity in all the great 
[175] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


», European literatures. Modern literature has been 


more or less sentimental since Petrarch, and a mor- 


ens 


seau, while of late a quality is beginning to appear 





“which we cannot better describe than as neurotic. 
We may say, to paraphrase an utterance of Cham- 
fort’s, that the success of some contemporary books 
is due to the correspondence that exists between the 
state of the author’s nerves and the state of the 
nerves of his public. Spiritual despondency, which 
under the name of acedza was accounted one of the 
seven deadly sins during the Middle Ages, has comein 
these later days to be one of the main resources of 
literature. Life itself has recently been defined by 
one of the lights of the French deliquescent school 
as “an epileptic fit between two nothings.” It is no 
small resource to be able to escape from these mias- 
matic exhalations of contemporary literature into 
the bracing atmosphere of the classics; to be able 
to rise into that purer ether 
‘where those immortal shapes 


Of bright aérial spirits live insphered 


In regions mild of calm and serene air.” 


We can, then, by no means allow the claims of 


[ 176 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


those who find in modern languages an adequate 
substitute for the classics. However, we agree with 
those who assert that if the classics are to maintain 
their traditional place, they should be related more 
largely to the needs and aspirations of modern life. 
With this end in view, classical study must take a 
new direction ; we need to emulate the spirit of the 
great scholars of the Renaissance, but to modify 
their methods. As to the present excess of German 
tendency in American classical scholarship, it may 
be left to remedy itself. The German research 
method appeals, indeed, to certain hard, positive 
qualities in the American mind, but other sides of 
the German ideal the American will find distasteful, 
on closer acquaintance; above all, he will prove 
incapable, in the long run, of the sublime disinter- 
estedness of the German specialist, who, so far from 
asking himself whether his work will ever serve any 
practical purpose, never stops to inquire whether it 
will serve any purpose at all. A reaction, then, 
against the exaggerations of German method and of 
the scientific spirit will do no harm, though the 
classics need to benefit by a full application of the 
historical and comparative methods. There is needed 


Meera 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


in the classics to-day a man who can understand 
the past with the result, not of loosening, but of 
strengthening his grasp upon the present. There is 
needed a type of scholar intermediary between the 
high school pedagogue and the university specialist, 
uae can interpret the classics in a large and liberal 
/ \spirit to American undergraduates, carrying with 
him into his task the consciousness that he is form- 
ing the minds and characters of the future citizens 
of a republic. The teaching of the classics thus un- 
derstood could be made one of the best preparations 
for practical life, and less might be heard of the 
stock complaint about wasting time in the study of 
the dead languages. As to this last charge, we may 
quote from the most eloquent appeal that has been 
made of late years for a more liberal study of the 
classics, — that of Lowell in his Harvard Anni- 
versary address. If the language of the Greeks is 
dead, he there says, “yet the literature it enshrines 
is rammed with life as perhaps no other writing, 
except Shakespeare’s, ever was or will be. It is as 
contemporary with to-day as with the ears it first 
enraptured, for it appeals not to the man of then 
or now, but to the entire round of human nature 


[178 ] 


RATIONAL STUDY OF THE CLASSICS 


itself. Men are ephemeral or evanescent, but what- 
ever page the authentic soul of man has touched 
with her immortalizing finger, no matter how long 
ago, is still young and fair as it was to the world’s 
gray fathers. Oblivion looks in the face of the Gre- 
cian Muse only to forget her errand, . . . We know 
not whither other studies will lead us, especially if 
dissociated from this ; we do know to what summits, 
far above our lower region of turmoil, this has led, 
and what the many-sided outlook thence.” 

There was never greater need of the Hellenic 
spirit than there is to-day, and especially in this 
country, if that charge of lack of measure and sense 
of proportion which foreigners bring against Amer- 
icans is founded in fact. As Matthew Arnold has 
admirably said, it is the Greek writers who best 
show the modern mind the path that it needs to take ; 
for the modern man cannot, like the man of the Mid- 
dle Ages, live by the imagination and religious faculty 
alone; on the other hand, he cannot live solely by 
the exercise of his reason and understanding. It is 
only by the union of these two elements of his na- 
ture that he can hope to attain a balanced growth, 
and this fusion of the reason and the imagination is 


[179 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


found realized more perfectly than elsewhere in the 
Greek classics of the great age. Those who can 
receive the higher initiation into the Hellenic spirit 
will doubtless remain few in number, but these few 
will wield a potent influence for good, each in his 
own circle, if only from the ability they will thereby 
have acquired to escape from contemporary illusions. 
For of him who has caught the profounder teach- 
ings of Greek literature we may say, in the words 
of the “Imitation,” that he is released froma multi- 
tude of opinions. 


Vil 
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


THE modern languages have had so much practical 
success in supplanting Greek and Latin that they 
have hardly felt the need as yet of justifying them- 
selves theoretically. The ancient humanities have 
been in general retreat in spite of the sturdy 
defense of Oxford and a few other strongholds 
of tradition. Sainte-Beuve’s last secretary tells 
us that he once overheard the great critic, himself 
one of the last of the humanists, muttering: ‘Les 
anciens ont perdu la partie.’ The Quarrel of An- 
cients and Moderns, remarks M. Faguet, will soon 
cease, because there will soon be nobody left 
who knows enough about the ancients even to 
argue the question. The new programmes for 
secondary education recently adopted in France 
seem likely to convert M. Faguet’s epigram into a 
fact. France, which did more than any other 
country to impose the imitation of antiquity as 
a dogma upon Europe, now tends in its attitude 


[ 18: | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


toward classical study to fall from superstition into 
irreverence. 

Modern languages, then, have had little to do 
but succeed. They have benefited by their utilita- 
rian appeal, and in the case of one’s mother tongue 
by their appeal to sentiment. They have benefited 
by the constantly increasing influence of women in 
literature and education. As a substitute for Greek 
and Latin, they have attracted the vast multitude 
which in its choice of studies follows more or less 
consciously the line of least resistance. In the mean- 
while certain fundamental questions have remained 
unsettled regarding the real value of modern lan- 
guages, especially one’s own language, as instru- 
ments of discipline and culture. Indeed, one may 
say that modern languages owe their popularity not 
so much to their being instruments of discipline as 
to their having afforded a means of escape from a 
definite discipline. They were greatly aided in their 
triumph over Latin and Greek by that movement 
to substitute sympathy for restraint which we have 
associated with Rousseau. But to make this point 
clear we shall need to review rapidly the Quarrel 
of Ancients and Moderns. 


[ 182 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


I 


In its purely literary aspects, the first phase of 
the Quarrel has become obsolete. If this first phase 
is still important, it is because of its being so 
closely related to the beginnings of the idea of 
progress.’ Only one of all the writers and wits who 
were engaged on either side of the Quarrel may 
be said to have perceived clearly the grounds on 
which the moderns were finally to break away from 
the imitation of the ancients and affirm the legiti- 
macy of their own modes of thought and expression. 
This writer was St. Evremond. He was already an 
adept in what was to be known later as the histori- 
cal method. He looks upon the Latin and Greek 
masterpieces not as absolute models raised above 
time and space, but as the product of special con- 
ditions of climate, religion, environment, etc. Now 
that all these conditions have changed, modern lit- 
eratures have a right to change with them. To 
impose Greek and Latin authors dogmatically is to 


1 The best treatment of this first phase of the quarrel is 
still that of H. Rigault: Za guerelle des anciens et des modernes 
(1856). 


[ 183 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


forget that they, no less than the moderns, were 
subject to the law of universal relativity. 

St. Evremond, however, was somewhat isolated 
in his own time, and as an inspirer of historical 
method can hardly be said to have been influential." 
For the modern phase of the Quarrel of Ancients 
and Moderns we do not need to go farther back 
than Rousseau, who had far less historical sense 
than St. Evremond. Yet Rousseau is the most im- 
portant initiator in the movement that was finally 
to dislodge the ancient languages from their exclu- 
sive position as standards of form and good taste. 
In the name of feeling, Rousseau headed the 
most powerful insurrection the world has ever 
seen against every kind of authority; and it was 
inevitable that he should attack the authority that 
classicism arrogated to itself over the individual 
sensibility, its pretension to regulate emotion in 
the name of fixed standards. Rousseau was espe- 
cially bitter against the classical, or rather the 


pseudo-classical, notion of decorum, which pro- 


™ St. Evremond (1610-1703) spent the last forty years of his 
life in exile at London. His influence on Dryden possibly appears 


in Dryden’s occasional anticipations of the historic method. 


[ 184 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


scribed spontaneity, or, as he would have said, 
silenced the voice of the heart in the name of a 
wearisome dignity. 

It was reserved for a German disciple of Rous- 
seau, Herder,’ to take the decisive step in carrying 
Rousseauism into the field of literature and history. 
Herder resembles Rousseau in that the significance 
of his work is often greater than its intrinsic value. 
He has immense importance as an initiator. He 
probably did more than any other man of his time 
to promote a sympathetic and imaginative interpre- 
tation of the past, and prepare the way for the tri- 
umph of that historical method which has proved so 
powerful a solvent of both Christian and classical 
dogma. In applying the historical method Herder 
did not, like St. Evremond, show the cold and 
cautious temper of the man of the world, but rather 
the temper of the romantic and humanitarian en- 
thusiast. Herder transfers to the nation the idea of 
organic growth and development that Rousseau had 
employed in his “ Emile”’ to revolutionize the educa- 
tion of the individual child. He dwells with particular 


? English influences such as Ossian and Percy’s Reliques codp- 
erated in Herder with the influence of Rousseau. 


[ 185 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


interest on the origins of nationalities, — especially 
of his own nationality, — and idealizes this first age 
of spontaneity and instinct much as Rousseau had 
exalted childhood as the Golden Age of the indi- 
vidual. Folk song and all forms of poetry that 
arise spontaneously are to be preferred to the con- 
scious creations of academic art. The Iliad and the 
Odyssey had been looked on by the previous age 
as the works of a single poet who wrote with 
direct reference to the rules of the epic as laid 
down in Le Bossu. Under the new influence Homer 
ceases to be a person, and becomes a mere name 
for a collection of popular ballads. 

The philosophical theory behind Herder’s method 
is an interesting extension of Rousseau’s idea of 
sympathy. According to Rousseau every man is to 
cultivate his own originality to the utmost, and 
then sympathize with other men who do likewise. 
According to Herder every nation is to cultivate to 
the utmost its own national genius, and then, as 
an offset to this self-assertion, have a comprehensive 
sympathy for other national originalities. National- 
ism is to be tempered by internationalism. Nation- 
alism and internationalism, as we have thus defined 


[ 186 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


them, first became effective as world forces with 
the French Revolution; but the theory is already 
complete in Herder and Rousseau.t Our modern 
cosmopolitanism is simply one form of Rousseau’s 
attempt to substitute sympathy for restraint as the 
foundation of ethics. Any one who believes that 
the instincts for brotherhood are strong enough to 
prevail unaided over the egoistic instincts in the 
relations between man and man may readily be- 
lieve in a similar altruistic triumph in international 
relations. But in the eyes of the old-fashioned mor- 
alist there is something chimerical in the underlying 
assumption of the Rousseauist. The whole notion 
that the diverse and clashing egoisms either of indi- 
viduals or nationalities will have a sufficient counter- 


1 The cosmopolitanism of sympathy is clearly formulated by 
Rousseau in a passage like the following: “ La commisération 
naturelle . . . ne réside plus que dans quelques grandes Ames cos- 
mopolites qui franchissent les barri¢res imaginaires qui séparent 
les peuples et qui a l’exemple de l’étre souverain qui les a créés 
embrassent tout le genre humain dans leur bienveillance” (Dés- 
cours sur lorigine, etc.). For the extent to which Rousseau en- 
couraged the inbreeding of national temperament, see the scheme 
of education outlined in his Considérations sur le gouvernement 
de la Pologne. 


[ 187 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


poise in sympathy alone, or in sympathy reinforced 
by an “enlightened self-interest,” may very well 
turn out to be—as some one said of the ten 
commandments —an “iridescent dream.” The 
Rousseauist would have men commune in their 
differences, or, to be more precise, would rest com- 
munion among men on a mixture of sympathy and 
self-assertion. Almost on the face of it, the older 
doctrine is less utopian which insisted, as a neces- 
sary preliminary to the free play of sympathy 
among men, that they should unite in a common 
discipline. This was the cosmopolitanism of me- 
dizeval Europe, when men were knit together ina 
single faith; and we should not forget that the 
Europe of the Middle Ages was in some respects 
more genuinely cosmopolitan than the Europe of 
to-day. 

There was also a literary cosmopolitanism before 
Rousseau, which likewise rested, so far as it went, 
on discipline rather than on sympathy. The neo- 
classical doctrine that held sway for over two cen- 
turies tended to impose on all cultivated Europeans, 
irrespective of country, common literary standards. 
It insisted that one should be a man before being 


[ 188 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


a German or Englishman or Frenchman. Local or 
personal peculiarities that interfered with conformity 
to the general norm were to be either disciplined or 
suppressed. This general norm that the neo-classi- 
cists set up suffered from artificiality and conven- 
tion. Neo-classicism undoubtedly went too far in its 
tendency to proscribe all localism, all sharp empha- 
sis on either individual or national traits. This 
extreme of self-effacement is one, at all events, of 
which we have been thoroughly cured. The Irish 
member of Parliament who recently arose and in- 
sisted on addressing the house in Gaelic had evi- 
dently attained to a high degree of both individual 
and racial self-assertion. He was a long way, in any 
case, from the old-fashioned notion of the gentle- 
man, who, it will be remembered, did not pride 
himself on anything — not even on being an Irish- 
man. 3 

The movement, then, begun by Rousseau and 
Herder involved an intense individualism and na- 
tionalism, and at the same time a cult of the prim- 
itive, the spontaneous, the instinctive. This cult 
assumed not only a poetical and imaginative, but 
also a strictly erudite form. We already have in 


[ 189 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


the Grimm brothers a mingling of exact scholarship 
and romantic enthusiasm. As one application of 
Rousseau’s exaltation of the felicities of instinct 
over conventional life, the new school turned away 
from the age of national maturity when a few great 
writers gave the full measure of their perfection, 
and devoted the powers of comprehension and sym- 
pathy, on which it prided itself, to the study of 
origins. Now the study of origins as the term was 
so often understood by the romanticists — z. e., 
national and collective origins —- means in prac- 
tice for all the European peoples a return to the 
Middle Ages. Medizevalism benefited immensely by 
the weakening of the classical tradition. Heine says 
that the Schlegels were interested in India only 
because they saw in India a sort of elephantine 
Middle Ages. But there was more than this in the 
study of the Far East; it became in the hands of 
the romanticists a means of undermining the clas- 
sical orthodoxy. The revelation of remote times and 
countries that were plainly cultivated, and yet in a 
way so strangely different from our own, had in 
it a potent suggestion of the new doctrine of rela- 
tivity ; it taught men to see, — | 


[ 190 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


“ Beyond their passion’s widest range 


Far regions of eternal change.” 


It helped them to feel that there was no one stand- 
ard of taste, as the classicists maintained, but a 
multiplicity of standards, each one justified by the 
special circumstances of its age and environment. 
The person who did more than any one else to 
popularize the new nationalism and cosmopolitanism 
was Madame de Staél. She was a direct disciple of 
Rousseau and at the same time a disciple of the 
Germans, chiefly through A. W. Schlegel, the tutor 
of her children. Her book on Germany marks an 
epoch in the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, and 
is probably more packed with thought than any 
other book ever written by a woman. A reading of 
Madame de Staél suggests that the ancients have 
suffered about as much from the influence of women 
who want a literature of sentiment and romance as 
they have from the influence of the scientific radi- 
cals, who can scarcely be said to want any litera- 
ture at all. Her work also suggests how much one 
is aided in becoming a modern by a defective sense 
of form. “Les Grecs,’’ says Madame de Staél, 


“tout étonnants qu’ils sont, laissent peu de re- 


[ 191 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


grets.”’* No one could have written that who really 
knew the Greeks at first hand, and at the same 
time had even a remote perception of that “antique 
symmetry’ which Leonardo da Vinci lamented his 
failure to attain (defuzt una mihi symmetria prisca). 
Conversely a man may be an arch-iconoclast, — 
he may, like M. Anatole France, display an anarchi- 
cal irreverence for every traditional belief, — and 
yet, if he has only a glimpse of the antique sym- 
metry, he will be a doubtful recruit for the mod- 
erns. “It is difficult,” says M. France, “to join in 
the illusions of those who think that Latin studies 
will be saved as soon as they share the noble name 
of classics with modern rivals, which, try as they 
may, will never equal them in dignity, strength, 
grace, and beauty.” 

An illuminating comparison might be made from 
the point of view of our present topic between 
Madame de Staél and a contemporary who had 
likewise come under the influence of Rousseau and 
Herder. Goethe’s position in the Quarrel of An- 


* It is only fair to Madame de Staé] to say that this sentence 
is taken from her earlier and less mature work De Ja Littérature 


(1° Partie, ch. iv). 


[ 192 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


cients and Moderns is of peculiar interest because 
he was at once a great scientist and a great man 
of letters, and also one of the earliest adepts in the 
new cosmopolitanism. At the same time he had a 
keen perception of the antique symmetry, and so, 
as he grows older, tends to return to the classical 
tradition. He refuses to treat Latin and Greek in 
a purely historical way, and affirms for them not 
only a relative but an absolute worth. In his later 
work one can even detect curious lapses into cer- 
tain classical, or rather pseudo-classical, errors. Yet 
Goethe can still be of help in showing how human- 
ism may be conciliated with the new cosmopoli- 
tanism. We shall have paid a heavy price for our 
historical method if as a result of attaining it we 
lose our sense of values and are set afloat on a 
boundless sea of relativity. The adjustment involved 
in escaping this danger is, as we already have said, 
the most difficult that the humanist has to make. 
We should add that Goethe’s way of dealing with 
this difficulty is substantially the same as that of 
Sainte-Beuve. “The time of universal literature has 
come,” says Goethe, and he urges us to cultivate in 


our attitude toward foreign literatures a world-wide 


[ 193 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


sympathy. But he adds that if “we are looking for 
masterpieces we must think neither of the Chin- 
ese nor of the Servians, nor of Calderon nor of 
the Niebelungenlied, but must turn to the ancient 
Greeks, for in their work is found the model of 
man in his true beauty. The rest we should con- 
sider only historically and in order to appropriate to 
ourselves whatever good we may find in it.” And 
again: ‘ Nowadays we are expected to be Greeks 
and Latins, English and French; and now they 
are mad enough to send us to the Far East. A 
young man must really lose his wits. To console 
Meyer, I showed him my colossal head of Juno as 
a symbol, telling him that he could remain with the 
Greeks and find tranquillity.” . 

In strict philosophy, Goethe’s position is, of 
course, untenable. Greece was subject, like other 
countries, to the law of relativity. Things classi- 
cal as well as things modern are a part of the 
universal flux. Yet Goethe’s solution has, if not a 
theoretical, at least a practical value. The fixed 
stars are not really fixed, but for ordinary purposes 
may be considered so. In like manner some of the 
ancients and a few of the greatest of the moderns 


[194] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


may be regarded as the fixed stars of literature. 
We may safely take our bearings with reference to 
them and be guided by them in deciding what is 
essence and what is accident in human nature. 
They are a sort of concrete zdea hominis. There 
is something definitive in their rendering of life, 
—something that is purged of all localism, and 
deserves to be received as typical, even if not in 
quite the sense that the neo-classic dogmatist sup- 
posed. For example, how many centuries may pass 
before we have another picture of womanhood at 
once so large, so simple, and so representative as the 
Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey! ‘ If we earnestly 


’ 


study classical antiquity,” says Goethe, “a feeling 


comes over us as though it were only then that we 


” 


really became men.” And he naturally concludes : 
“May the study of Greek and Roman literature 


ever remain the basis of the higher culture.” 


II 


Goethe occasionally reverts to the neo-classic nar- 
rowness in his later opinions; yet in the main he 
illustrates admirably how it is possible to attain 
the widest knowledge and sympathy and at the 


[195 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


same time insist on judgment and selection. Like 
a true humanist, he combines opposite extremes 
and occupies all the space between them. One who 
has been sufficiently fortified in his sense of values 
may benefit greatly by what we have defined as 
Rousseauism. If a man has thoroughly assimilated 
the great masterpieces and attained a firm grasp on 
the humane tradition, he may profitably round out his 
humanism by the new cosmopolitan virtues and the 
historical method. But Rousseauism left toitself tends 
to inbreed individual and national temperament, and 
to substitute miscellaneous sympathies (or antipa- 
thies) for firm principles of judgment. Obviously 
the danger of impressionism is greater for the mod- 
ern than for the ancient languages: first, because 
of the very nature of the new cosmopolitanism to 
which the modern languages owe their success ; sec- 
ond, because the problem of selection has not been 
simplified for the moderns, as for the ancients, by 
time. Only those books come down which deserve 
to last, says Emerson; and it may be said of most 
of the books which a teacher of the classics is 
likely to use that they are intrinsically important 
as well as important for their influence on the 


[ 196 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


thought and literature of the world. The choice of 
books in the modern field, on the other hand, is 
likely to represent nothing higher than purely indi- 
vidual or national preferences, and often mere 
caprice. There is the constant peril in the modern 
languages of a cheap contemporaneousness. From 
the lists of books read in schools and colleges and 
from publishers’ catalogues one might infer that 
what is now taking the place of the masterpieces 
of Greece and Rome is a hodge-podge of second- 
rate French and German novels. Even the best 
judges are likely to be impressionists in dealing with 
contemporaries ; so that from the point of view of 
the college one would be tempted to lay down the 
rule that the only good authors are dead authors. 
In selecting reading, the modern-language teacher 
often does not consult even his own impressions, 
but the impressions of his students, and in his 
endeavor to secure their interest condescends delib- 
erately to their crudity and immaturity. I once 
knew a French teacher who submitted the choice 
of books to be read to the vote of his class, — 
a truly democratic deference to the will of the 
majority. The danger, as another teacher explained 


L197 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


to me, is that, if too high a standard of reading 
is set, the modern languages will be made as dull 
as Latin. It is true that something may well be 
sacrificed in the elementary courses to secure the 
interest of students, but this principle is being 
pushed too far. The test of a teacher, after all, is 
his power so to stimulate his students as to raise 
their interests to a higher level. From the point 
of view of the college the vital question is not 
whether a teacher inspires interest, but what kind 
of interest he inspires and in what quality of un- 
dergraduate. The college teacher should strive to 
interest his more capable men, even at the risk of 
boring the dullards. 

The danger of a trivial and inferior choice of . 
reading is not confined to contemporaries. Emer- 
son’s dictum that only those books come down which 
deserve to last has truth, if only it is taken to mean 
a real survival. A remarkable feature of modern 
scholarship, however, has been its tendency to dis- 
inter things to which the past had given decent 
burial. What are we to think, for instance, of the 
seventeenth-century English dramatists as a field 
of study for girl undergraduates? “Set the maiden 


[ 198 J 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


fancies wallowing in the troughs of ” — Wycherley. 
Of course the difficulty we refer to comes largely 
from the confusion of college and university stand- 
ards, and we realize what a delicate adjustment is 
involved in institutions that set out to be at once 
college and university. Wycherley has his place in 
a university course, along with many other things 
that are contrary to the principle of selection on 
which the college rests. We should add that this 
latitude is desirable, even in the university, only 
when a large proportion of those who frequent it 
have already had a humane training. The confusion 
of university and college standards is one from 
which even the smaller college suffers. The young 
Ph. D., with his one-sided interest in his own spe- 
cialty, is turned loose upon it, and often allowed to 
inflict his naive enthusiasms on undergraduates. 

It is hardly necessary to enlarge further on the 
danger of impressionism in modern language study. 
This danger is generally recognized. The real dif- 
ference of opinion is as to the remedy. The counter- 
irritant that is at present most in favor is philology. 
Impressionism tempered by philological research 
(mainly in the medizeval field) — that would seem 


[ 199] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


to sum up the present tendency in modern lan- 
guages. The emphasis on the Middle Ages is due 
in part, of course, to German influence. Our Ameri- 
can scholarship, like the German scholarship from 
which it is imitated, has a predilection for origins, 
for “art’s spring-birth so dim and dewy.” But our 
medizevalism is also due to the need that is felt of 
some counterpoise to the “softness’’ of the more 
strictly modern period — especially in English. 
Discipline in philology, however, will not take the 
place of the restraint that comes from a recognition 
of humane standards, Linguistic accuracy we must 
have in any case. The practical question is whether 
the average student in the modern field cannot get 
this accuracy and at the same time more assistance 
in forming humane standards from a classical rather 
than from a medizval background. Reasons that 
favor the classics may be drawn from the historical 
method itself. For the historical method is not con- 
cerned only with philological facts and their inter- 
relationship, but also with the transmission of ideas. 
Now if the modern languages are related philologi- 
cally * to the Middle Ages, they are related imagina- 

* No one can be a good medizvalist who is not also a good 


[ 200 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


tively and intellectually in at least an equal degree 
to ancient Greece and Rome. It is an historical 
fact that one may regret, but a fact none the less, 
that there is a sharp break, or, as the French ex- 
press it, a solution of continuity, between medizeval 
and modern France. A student of modern French 
who neglects the Latin classics to become familiar 
with the Chanson de Roland or the mystery plays 
or Chrétien de Troyes is allowing himself to be 
diverted from something that the great French 
writers were steeped in to something of which they 
had little or no knowledge. The break with the 
medizeval past was less abrupt in England than in 
France; yet even for the student of English litera- 
ture an acquaintance with the Middle Ages before 
Chaucer is vastly less important than an acquaint- 
ance with the classics. The best avenue of approach 
to the great English poets, for example, is not 
through Czdmon and Beowulf, as some misguided 
moderns would have us believe, but through Homer 
and Virgil. 

Latinist. If the direct linguistic relation of modern languages is 
with the Middle Ages, the remoter relationship is, of course, in the 


case of the Romance languages almost entirely, and in the case 


of English largely, with Latin. 


[ 201 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


In theory several of our institutions, especially 
Harvard, admit the importance of the classical back- 
ground. But practically, when a graduate student is 
once started on his bit of medizeval research, he not 
only has to forego his classics, but in preparing for 
his doctor’s examination often has to cram from 
manuals a hasty knowledge of the very parts of the 
modern field that he is afterwards to teach. In 
pleading for a less rampant medizevalism, we do not 
mean to disparage the Middle Ages. The value of 
medizeval studies in themselves is not in question, 
but merely the wisdom of subordinating to these 
studies other fields of study that are still more 
valuable. It is a pity that life is so short and human 
energy so limited, for otherwise one might do full 
justice to all three periods, — classical, medizeval, 
and modern. A man who was not planning to be 
a medizeval specialist might without sacrifice of 
proportion take a course even in Gothic, if only he 
had what Lowell calls “‘ the centurial adolescence of 
Methuselah.” 3 

The average student of modern languages should 
have a general grounding in the Middle Ages, and 
should have above all the knowledge of medizval 


[ 202 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


life that comes from a careful study of Dante and 
Chaucer. But hope for a revival of sound literary 
standards lies, not in our present insistence on medi- 
zeval philology, but rather in linking together the 
two ends of the humane tradition that have been 
disjoined by an unprofitable antagonism between 
ancients and moderns. As I have said elsewhere, 
an entirely new chapter in the relations of ancients 
and moderns will begin when they realize that they 
must not only cease to quarrel, but actually codper- 
ate, if they are to make head against their common 
enemies, the pure utilitarians and scientific radicals. 
Latin and Greek must not attempt to arrogate to 
themselves alone the title of /2ttere humantores. It 
is still more or less true in England, though less true 
than formerly, that a teacher of the classics enjoys 
prestige and dignity, whereas a teacher of modern 
languages is regarded as being about on a level with 
a teacher of dancing. The ancient humanities can- 
not maintain permanently this haughty isolation. 
The moderns are even now battering at the gates 
of Oxford, and Oxford will be fortunate if in making 
a necessary adjustment it does not become involved, 
as we have been, in all kinds of dubious radical experi- 


[ 203 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ments. The ancient humanities will gain greatly in 
interest by closer contact with the moderns; the 
moderns for their part will deserve to rank as 
humanities at all only by recognizing fully their 
indebtedness to the ancients. The classics with the 
modern foreground will be safeguarded against dry- 
ness and stagnation ; the moderns with the classical 
background will be saved from impressionism and 
superficiality. 


Il 


This whole problem of interrelating ancients and 
moderns is one, however, that concerns the college 
much more nearly than it does the graduate school. 
Graduate students of modern languages should 
already have a firm classical foundation. As it is, 
many of these students, as well as a fair proportion 
of their teachers, resemble Shakespeare ' in at least 
one respect, — they have ‘small Latin and less 
Greek.” This lack is the natural outcome of the 


* Or rather the popular notion of Shakespeare. The atmos- 
phere in which Shakespeare wrote was so saturated with Greek 
and Latin influence as to make his direct acquaintance with the 
classics a secondary question. 


[ 204 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


predominance of moderns over ancients in under- 
graduate study. At Harvard, for example, there are 
over five times as many undergraduate enrollments 
in modern language electives (including English) as 
in the classics. Some of the more thoughtful of the 
moderns are beginning to see that such a difference 
in their favor is already undesirable ; and that if it 
continues to grow until college and university study 
of the classics is relegated to a few specialists the 
result will be disastrous to the interests of culture. 
Passing mention has been made of the Honors in 
Literature established at Harvard in 1903. This 
new scheme, quite apart from the practical question 
whether it will prove attractive to undergraduates, 
deserves some attention as a declaration of prin- 
ciples. To quote from the preliminary announce- 
ment, the purpose of Honors in Literature is “ to 
offer in addition to the existing schemes for honors 
a plan that will encourage undergraduates to com- 
bine reading in the classics with reading in the 
modern languages. It is desired to emphasize in 
this way the underlying unity of literary study, 
and especially the interdependence of classical 
and modern literature.” The plan is, in short, an 


[ 205 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


attempt, probably the first attempt on the part 
of a college faculty, not only at a truce between 
ancients and moderns, but at a cordial codperation 
in the interests of a broader and sounder literary - 
training. 

The new Harvard honors have some analogy with 
the examinations for classical honors at Oxford. 
They resemble the Oxford honors in encouraging 
the student to independent reading ; in subordinat- 
ing philology to literature ; in testing primarily the 
student’s powers of assimilation ; and in not requir- 
ing even so much research as is represented by a 
thesis. There is an evident danger in eliminating 
so completely the linguistic element. Special vigi- 
lance will be needed to save the scheme from the 
charge of ‘softness,’ and to make clear that it is 
intended to produce humanists and not dilettantes. 
Our language teachers, trained for the most part 
almost exclusively in the methods of scientific re- 
search, are only too prone to confuse the humanist 
with the dilettante, to grant the name of scholar 
only to the man who is concerned with the collect- 
ing and classifying of facts. An equivalent, there- 


fore, must be found in most cases for the Plato and 
[ 206 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


Aristotle that give bone and sinew to the honor 
examinations at Oxford. A more thorough grasp of 
Greek philosophy is indeed one of the great deszde- 
_ vata of American scholarship ; yet Greek philosophy 
can hardly hope to occupy the same position here 
as in the English universities, even if we should 
some day have classical scholars less interested in 
the uses of the optative in Plato and Aristotle and 
more interested in the supreme position of these 
writers in the history of human thought. 
Theoretically —in codrdinating the ancient and 
modern fields —the Harvard Honors in Literature 
represent an important advance on anything at Ox- 
ford ; practically, neither this nor the other honor 
schemes at Harvard or other American institutions 
are likely soon to rival Oxford either in the stand- 
ard of assimilative scholarship they attain or in the 
number of students they attract. The average edu- 
cated American usually knows that a pass degree 
in the English universities is easy to get ; he is often 
ignorant of the far more important fact that a large 
proportion of the students at Oxford, for example, 
take not a pass degree, but a degree with honors. 
Not only are many more honor degrees granted at 


[ 207 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Oxford? than at Harvard, but the Oxford honor ex- 
aminations are much more difficult than the corre- 
sponding Harvard examinations. Of course, for the 
average Harvard undergraduate a college education 
does not mean honor work at all, but only too often 
a mere patchwork of large elementary courses, sup- 
plemented by professional or semi-professional study 
toward the end. 

Stated, then, in the simplest terms, Harvard under- 
graduate work represents a low grade, Oxford a high 
grade, of assimilative scholarship. An unfriendly 
critic might add that if our colleges are inferior 
in assimilative scholarship to England, our grad- 
uate schools are inferior in productive scholarship 
to Germany. The first inferiority, however, is 
even more certain than the second, and, one is 
tempted to add, more serious, as affecting even more 
directly the whole tone of our national life. In spite 
of the immense stir we have been making of late 


* According to the report of the Curzon committee, 531 men 
received honors at Oxford in 1907. The Oxford Calendar for 1906 
shows 3663 undergraduates in residence. It would seem to follow 
from these figures that at least one half the Oxford undergraduates 
take degrees with honors. 


[ 208 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


about higher education, publishers assure us that 
for years past the demand for good reading has 
been decreasing rather than increasing. The Har- 
vard Honors in Literature are intended to cultivate 
not only a taste for good reading, but the habit of 
doing this reading relatedly. The highest ambition 
of the friends of the college as opposed to the uni- 
versity should be to build up a popular honor sys- 
tem. The building up of such a system may prove, 
after all, the most practical means of rehabilitating 
the Bachelor of Arts degree, of giving it the mean- 
ing and seriousness it is so rapidly losing. It 
would hardly be going too far to say that the 
American college, with most of the things it has 
traditionally represented, is threatened at present 
with utter extinction. The Bachelor of Arts degree 
is menaced not merely by the curtailment of the 
term of residence,’ but even more seriously, per- 
haps, by the widening out of the conditions on 
which the degree is granted, until it ceases to have 


* President Butler’s proposal to reduce the term of residence to 
two years has naturally been followed by proposals from aspiring 
high-school teachers to annex what is left of the college course to 


the preparatory schools. 


[ 209 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


any meaning. For instance, at Leland Stanford 
University a student may enter, not only without 
Latin and Greek, but without any language or non- 
scientific subject whatsoever except English com- 
position, and then receive his Bachelor of Arts 
degree on completing a certain number of hours’ 
work in mechanical engineering.’ At this rate, the 
Bachelor of Arts degree may soon come to be 
granted to a student as a reward for getting his 
professional training as a plumber! At all events, 
so far as Leland Stanford is concerned, the Bachelor 
of Arts degree has already been emptied utterly of 
its traditional content. The whole question is one 
in which the alumni of the older institutions should 
take an active interest, and not leave it, as they have 
seemed inclined to do heretofore, to the educational 
experts. They should remember that a majority of 
these supposed experts are men of German training, 
whose primary interest is not in the college, but in 
the graduate school. 

The day, then, may soon come, if indeed it has not 
come already, when the Bachelor of Arts degree, to 
have any real significance, will not only need to be 


™ See Leland Stanford Register, 1906-07, pp. 36, 74. 


[ 210] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


accompanied by the name of the institution, but will 
need furthermore to be an honor degree. No doubt 
much may be done toward improving undergraduate 
instruction bya more careful tutorial supervision of 
the large courses, and by raising the standard of 
course examinations. There should be, in addition 
to all this, however, some proof of a connected plan 
of study, such as is furnished by a man who has won 
even a fourth class in an honor school at Oxford. 
The problem is to prevent incoherencies of choice 
on the part of the student, while allowing him every 
reasonable freedom of election. To meet under- 
graduate needs, an honor group should be broad and 
flexible ; it should be primarily assimilative in pur- 
pose, and make no premature attempt to encourage 
research; finally, it should not take all of the 
student’s time, but should leave him leisure for the 
pursuit of minor subjects. An honor system con- 
ceived in this spirit might be made the means, not 
of reacting against the elective system, but of com- 
pleting it, unless, indeed, like some educational radi- 
cals, we conceive of the elective system as a mere 
orgy of individualism. 

No honor scheme, any more than the present 


fete] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


system of course examinations, will ever avail to 
distinguish between the student of humanistic in- 
stincts and the mere “ grind.”’ However, it might 
be easier to distinguish between the two kinds of 
students by a general examination on an honor 
group than by any adding up of marks in separate 
and often unrelated courses. The test of a student 
from the point of view of the college is not what he 
can do in any particular course, but how far he is 
able to organize the work he has done in all his 
courses into an orderly whole. Emphasis is rightly 
laid in the preparatory school on work done in sep- 
arate courses ; this emphasis may be lessened in the 
college, the purpose of which is to test not only the - 
acquisitive, but even more the assimilative powers 
of the mind. We should not lose sight of the ele- 
mentary truth that any honor scheme, however in- 
genious, is not worth much more than the living 
spirit of the men who are behind it. The success of 
undergraduate literary instruction will finally depend 
on the securing of men who are fitted for it both 
by native endowment and by adequate training in 
the graduate school or elsewhere. The evident dan- 
ger of any form of the group system when not 


[ 212 ] 


ANCIENTS AND MODERNS 


administered by the right kind of men is that it 
will lead to premature specialization. 

It is possible to conceive of honor schemes that 
will have a fair measure of success.‘ The Honors 
in History and Literature established at Harvard in 
1906 promise well in this respect. One should not, 
however, be too sanguine as to the immediate suc- 
cess of any plan for interrelating the study of the 
ancient and the modern languages, though the prin- 
ciple involved is, from the humane point of view, 
the most important of all. One great drawback is 
the unpopularity of the classics in this country. 
The case of our American classical departments is 
about the reverse of that of the lion’s den in the 
fable: all tracks lead away from them. A much 
graver obstacle to the union of ancients and moderns 
in a common humane endeavor is the evident 
intention of the moderns to push their present 
advantage to the utmost. One can only deplore the 


™ The success in a large way of schemes for honors might ne- 
cessitate the creation of separate examining boards, or else a great 
simplification in the present system of course examinations. The 
conducting of both course and honor examinations would impose 


an unfair burden on our already overworked faculties. 


[ 213 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


complacency with which modern-language teachers 
as a body seem to regard the rapid decline of Greek 
studies during the past few years as well as the 
prospect of a demand in the near future for a 
Bachelor of Arts degree without Latin. The cur- 
rent utilitarianism, which appears to exalt the study 
of the modern at the expense of the ancient lan- 
guages, will, if yielded to, deprive this very study of 
a large part of its seriousness and dignity. President 
Hadley may, as he said in a recent address, prefer 
«Wilhelm Meister” to Plato; but no one, it should 
be remembered, would be more offended by the doc- 
trine implied in this utterance than Goethe himself. 
The modern languages will escape from the sus- 
picion of being a cheap substitute for the traditional 
discipline only when taught with due reference to 
the classical background by men who are themselves 
good classical scholars. 


VIll 
ON BEING ORIGINAL 


THERE has been a radical change during the last 
hundred years in the world’s attitude toward origin- 
ality. An age of conformity has given way to an 
age of self-assertion ; so that nowadays a man makes 
a bid for fame by launching a paradox, much as he 
might have done in the time of Pope by polishing 
a commonplace./ Then, even a person of genuine 
originality was in danger of being accounted freak- 
ish. Now, many a man passes for original who is in 
reality only freakish, Boileau, speaking for the old 
criticism, says that Perrault was “ bizarre ;” Sainte- 
Beuve, speaking for the new, says that Perrault had 
genius. From the outset, the neo-classic critics 
stifled free initiative in the name of the “rules,” 
and opposed to every attempt at innovation the 
authority of Aristotle and the ancients. The rela- 
tion of the literary aspirant to the “ models”’ during 
this period is not unfairly summed up in the words 
of the comic opera, — 


[215 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


“Of course you can never be like us, 


But be as like us as you’re able to be.” 


Later, under French influence, the tyranny of eti- 
quette was added to the tyranny of classical imita- 
tion. Aristotle was reinforced by the dancing mas- 
ter. Social convention so entwined itself about the 
whole nature of a Frenchman of the Old Régime 
that it finally became almost as hard for him as we 
may suppose it is for a Chinaman to disengage his 
originality from the coils of custom. The very word 
original was often used as a term of ridicule and 
disparagement. Brossette writes of the Oriental trav- 
eler Tavernier that he is ‘brutal and even a bit 
original.” ‘‘ When it is desired to turn any one to 
ridicule,’ writes Boursault about the same time, “ he 


is said to be an oviginal sans copie.’ Anything in 
literature or art that departed from the conventional 
type was pronounced “monstrous.’’ La Harpe 
applies this epithet to the “‘ Divine Comedy,” and 
points out how inferior the occasional felicities of this 
“absurd and shapeless rhapsody ” are to the correct 
beauties of a true epic like Voltaire’s “‘ Henriade.”’ 
And so we might go on, as Mr. Saintsbury, for 


example, does for scores of pages in his “ History of 


[ 216 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


Criticism,’ exposing the neo-classic narrowness, and 
setting forth in contrast the glories of our modern 
emancipation. But this is to give one’s self the plea- 
sure, as the French would say, of smashing in open 
doors. Instead of engaging in this exhilarating pas- 
time, we might, perhaps, find more profit in inquir- 
ing, first, into the definite historical reasons that led 
to the triumph of the so-called school of good sense 
over the school of genius and originality ; and sec- 
ond, in seeking for the element of truth that lurked 
beneath even the most arid and unpromising of the 
neo-classic conventions. For if, like Mr. Saintsbury 
and many other romanticists, we reject the truth 
along with the convention, we shall simply fall from 
one extreme into another. 

The whole subject of originality is closely bound 
up with what is rather vaguely known as individual- 
ism. We must recollect that before the disciplinary 
classicism of the later Renaissance there was an ear- 
lier Renaissance which was in a high degree favor- 
able to originality. At the very beginning of this 
earlier period, Petrarch made his famous plea for 
originality, in a letter to Boccaccio, and established 
his claim, in this as in other respects, to be considered 


[ar7 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


the first modern man. “Every one,” says Petrarch, 
“has not only in his countenance and gestures, but 
also in his voice and language, something peculiarly 
his own (guzddam suum ac proprium), which it is 
both easier and wiser to cultivate and correct than 
it is to alter.” And so many of the Italians who 
followed Petrarch set out to cultivate the guzddam 
suum ac proprium, often showing real ardor for self- 
expression, and still oftener, perhaps, using the new 
liberty merely as a cloak for license. Society finally 
took alarm, not only at the license, but at the clash 
of rival originalities, each man indulging in his own 
individual sense without much reference to the gen- 
eral or common sense of mankind. We need not, 
however, repeat what we have already said in our 
first essay about the reaction of the later Renais- 
sance against an excessive individualism. This reac- 
tion, especially in France and Italy, soon ran into 
excesses of its own. Yet we must not forget that, 
at the moment when the neo-classic disciplinarian 
appeared on the scene, the great creative impulse 
of the early Renaissance was already dying out or 
degenerating into affectation. The various forms of 
bad taste that spread like an epidemic over Europe 


[ 218 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning 
of the seventeenth (cultism, Marinism, euphuism, 
préciosité, etc.), have their common source in a 
straining to be original in defiance of sound reason. 
We may say of the writers of these different 
schools as a class that, in spite of occasional lyrical 
felicities, they have “all the nodosities of the oak 
without its strength and all the contortions of the 
Sibyl without the inspiration.” 

The school of good sense was the natural and 
legitimate protest against this pseudo-originality. 
But this school can be justified on higher grounds 
than simply as a reaction from a previous excess. It 
tried to apply, however imperfectly, the profound 
doctrine of Aristotle that the final test of art is not 
its originality, but its truth to the universal. The 
question is one of special interest because we are 
living in an age that comes at the end of a great 
era of expansion, comparable in some ways to that 
of the Renaissance. Now, as then, there is a riot 
of so-called originality. In the name of this origin- 
ality art is becoming more and more centrifugal 
and eccentric. As the result of our loss of stand- 
ards, the classicist would complain, we are inbreed- 


[ 219 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


ing personal and national peculiarities and getting 
farther and farther away from what is universally 
human. 

In other words, the chief ambition of our mod- 
ern art, which resembles in this respect some of 
the art of the later Renaissance, is to be original. 
The first aim of both classic and neo-classic art, on 
the other hand, was to be representative. Aristotle 
had said that it is not enough to render a thing as 
it is in this or that particular case, but as it is in 
general; and he goes on to say that the superiority 
of poetry over history lies in the fact that it has 
more of this universality, that it is more concerned 
with the essentials and less with the accidents of 
human nature. The weakness of neo-classic art was 
that it substituted the rule of thumb and servile 
imitation for direct observation in deciding what 
were accidents and what were essentials. It was 
ready to proscribe a thing as “monstrous,” — that 
is, aS outside of nature, when in reality it was 
simply outside the bounds set by certain commenta- 
tors on Aristotle. The artist had to conform to the 
conventional types established in this way, even 
if he sacrificed to them poignancy and directness 


[ 220 | 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


of emotion. He was limited by the type not only in 
- dealing with any particular literary form, — tragedy, 
epic, and so forth, — but even in his creating of 
individual characters. For example, he must be care- 
ful not to paint a particular soldier, but the typi- 
cal soldier, and of course he was not to depart too 
far from the classical models in deciding what the 
traits of the typical soldier are. Thus Rymer con- 
demns Iago because he is not true to the ‘ charac- 
ter constantly worn by soldiers for some thousands 
of years in the world.” According to Rymer, 
again, the queen in one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s 
plays oversteps the bounds of decorum. Some 
particular queen, Rymer admits, may have acted 
in this way; but she must be rid of all her “acci- 
dental historical impudence’”’ before she can become 
an orthodox, typical queen, entitled to “stalk in 
tragedy on her high shoes.” 

The attempt of the neo-classicists to tyrannize 
over originality and restrict the creative impulse in 
the name of the type was bound in the long run 
to provoke a reaction. To carry through the dif- 
ficult and delicate task of breaking with conven- 
tion some man of more than Socratic wisdom was 


[ 221 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


needed ; instead, this task was undertaken by the 
“self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.’ In almost 
the opening sentence of his “ Confessions’ Rous- 
seau strikes the note that is heard throughout the 
nineteenth century, from the early romanticists to 
Ibsen and Sudermann: “If I am not better than 
other men, at least I am different.” By this gloat- 
ing sense of his own departure from the type Rous- 
seau became the father of eccentric individualists. 
By his insistence on the rights and legitimacy of 
unrestrained emotion he inaugurated the age of 
storm and stress, not only in Germany, but through- 
out Europe. Our modern impressionists, who would 
make of their own sensibility the measure of all 
things, are only his late-born disciples. 

Emotion, insists the classicist, must be disci- 
plined and subdued to what is typical ; else it will be 
eccentric and not true to the human heart. “ The 
human heart of whom?” cries Alfred de Musset, 
like a true disciple of Jean-Jacques. ‘The human 
heart of what? Even though the devil be in it, I 
have my human heart of my own —/’az mon coeur 
humain, mot.’ The whole of French romanticism 
is in that soz. Away with stale authority, usage, 


Rep) 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


and tradition, that would come between a man and 
his own spontaneity, and keep him from immediate 
contact with “nature.’’ Let him once more see the 
world bathed in the fresh wonder of the dawn. To 
this end let him discard books (‘a dull and endless 
strife’) and live as if ‘‘ none had lived before him.” 

Every man, in short, is to be an original genius. 
It was the assumption of this attitude by Rous- 
seau’s followers in Germany that gave its name to 
‘a whole literary period (Genzezezt). Germany sought 
its emancipation from convention, not, as Lessing 
would have wished, through the discipline of rea- 
son, but through “ genius”’ and “ originality,” which 
Meant in practice the opening of the floodgates of 
sentiment. We can imagine the disgust with which 
Lessing looked on the Rousseauism of the youthful 
Goethe. In “ Werther,” critics are accused of being 
in a conspiracy against originality. Their rules are 
compared to a system of dams and trenches with 
which the critics protect their own little cabbage- 
patches against genius, whose impetuous waves 
would otherwise burst forth and overwhelm them, 
and atthe same time astound the world. One thinks 
of Lessing’s admirable defense of criticism, of the 


[ 223 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


passage in which he confesses that he owes all he 
has, not to genius and originality, but to a patient 
assimilation of the wisdom of the past. “ Without 
criticism I should be poor, cold, short-sighted. I am, 
therefore, always ashamed or annoyed when I hear 
or read anything in disparagement of criticism. It 
is said to suppress genius, and I flattered myself 
that I had gained from it something very nearly 
approaching genius. I am a lame man who cannot 
possibly be edified by abuse of his crutch.” 

We are still inclined to side with original genius 
against what Lessing calls criticism. Criticism itself 
has come to mean nowadays mere appreciativeness, 
instead of meaning, as it did for Lessing, the ap- 
plication of standards of judgment. It may, how. 
ever, appear some day how much the great roman- 
tic leaders, Shelley for example, suffered from the 
absence of just what Lessing called criticism. Men 
may then grow weary of a genius and originality 
that are at bottom only an outpouring of undisci- 
plined emotion. One whole side of our American 
transcendental school is only a belated echo of Ger- 
man romanticism, which itself continues the age of 


original genius. There is special danger even in 


[ 224 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


-Emerson’s conception of originality, and the un- 
bounded deference with which it fills him for the 
untrained individual. Every man, to become great, 
merely needs, it would appear, to plant himself in- 
domitably on his instincts ; but it is not safe for the 
average person to trust so blindly to what Rymer 
would have called his own “ maggot.” Hawthorne, 
the best observer of the group, has left an account 
of some of the nightmare originalities that were 
developed under the Concord influence. 

We read of a certain character in one of Mari- 
vaux’s plays: “ He is a man whose first impulse is 
to ask, not, ‘Do you esteem me?’ but, ‘Are you 
surprised at me?’ His purpose is not to convince 
us that he is better than other people, but that he 
resembles himself alone.’”” The comedy in which this 
eighteenth-century Bernard Shaw figures was writ- 
ten a number of years before Rousseau assumed the 
Armenian costume and began to agitate Europe 
with his paradoxes. Since Rousseau the world has 
become increasingly familiar with the man who poses 
and attitudinizes before it and is not satisfied until 
he can draw its attention to the traits that establish 
his own uniqueness. The eccentric individualist not 


[ 225 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


only rejoices in his own singularity, but is usually 
eager to thrust it on other people. His aim is to 
startle, or, as the French would say, to pater le bour- 
geois, to make the plain citizen “stare and gasp.” 
Dr. Johnson said of Lord Monboddo that if he had 
had a tail he would have been as proud of it as a 
squirrel. Perhaps Rousseau was never more deeply 
hurt than by the lady who said, on breaking with 
him, “ You’re just like other men.” This, as a 
French critic remarks, was a home thrust that one 
of Molicre’s soubrettes could not have improved 
upon. The claim of Rousseau and his earlier fol- 
lowers was to be not simply unique, but unique in 
feeling. This sentiment of uniqueness in feeling 
speedily became that of uniqueness in suffering — 
on the familiar principle, no doubt, that life, which 
is a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for 
those who feel. Hence arose in the romantic school 
a somewhat theatrical affectation of grief. Byron 
was far from being the first who paraded before the 
public “ the pageant of his bleeding heart.’ Chateau- 
briand especially nourished in himself the sense of 
fated and preéminent sorrow, and was ready to 
exclaim at the most ordinary mischance: “ Such 
[ 226 | 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


things happen only to me!” Sainte-Beuve makes 
an interesting comparison between Chateaubriand 
and another native of Brittany, the author of “ Gil 
Blas.” “A book like ‘René,’” says Sainte-Beuve, 
“encourages a subtle spiritual pride. A man seeks 
in his imagination some unique misfortune to which 
he may abandon himself and which he may fold 
about him in solitude. He says to himself that a 
great soul must contain more sorrow than a little 
one ; and adds in a whisper that he himself may be 
this great soul. ‘Gil Blas,’ on the other hand, is a 
book that brings you into full contact with life and 
the throng of your fellow creatures. When you are 
very gloomy and believe in fatality and imagine that 
certain extraordinary things happen to you alone, 
read ‘Gil Blas,’ and you will find that he had that 
very misfortune or one just like it, and that he took 
it as a simple mishap and got over it.”’ 

The same contrast might be brought out by com- 
paring Montaigne and Rousseau, the two writers 
who, in a broad sense, are the masters respectively 
of Lesage and Chateaubriand. This contrast is 
easily missed, because at first glance Montaigne 
seems an arch-egotist like Rousseau, and is almost 


[ 227 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


equally ready to bestow his own idiosyncrasies on 
the reader. Yet in the final analysis Montaigne is 
interested in Montaigne because he is a human 
being ; Rousseau is interested in Rousseau because 
he is Jean-Jacques. Montaigne observes himself im- 
partially as a normal specimen of the genus homo. 
Rousseau, as we have seen, positively gloats over 
his own otherwiseness. Montaigne aims to be the 
average, or, it would be less misleading to say, the 
representative man; Rousseau’s aim is to be the 
extraordinary man, or original genius. Rousseau is 
an eccentric, Montaigne a concentric individualist. 
The sentence of Montaigne that sums him up is, 
“Every man bears within him the entire image of 
the human lot.” Rousseau is rather summed up in 
his phrase, ‘ There are souls that are too privileged 
to follow the common path,” with its corollary that 
he is himself one of these privileged souls. 

The nineteenth century saw the rise of a race of 
eccentric individualists, especially in art and litera- 
ture, who, like Rousseau, scorned the common path 
and strove to distinguish themselves from the bour- 
geois and philistine in everything, from the details of 
their dress to the refinements of their sensations. In 


[ 228 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


this quest of the rare and the original they attained 
to a departure from the norm that was not only 
eccentric, but pathological. Every man was to have 
the right to express not only his own particular vision 
of life, but his own particular nightmare. We finally 
come toa writer like Baudelaire, who builds himself 
a “little strangely scented and strangely colored 
kiosk on the extreme tip of the romantic Kam- 
chatka”’ and “cultivates his hysteria with delight 


’ 


and terror;’’ who, instead of being true to the 
human heart, as the old-fashioned classicist would 
say, makes it his ambition to create a “new shud- 


” 


der.’ All the modern writer cares for, says M. 
Anatole France, is to be thought original. In his 
fear of becoming commonplace he prides himself, 
like Victor Hugo, on reading only those books that 
other men do not read, or else he does not read at 
all, and so comes to resemble that eighteenth-century 
Frenchwoman who was said to have “ respected in 
her ignorance the active principle of her originality.” 
The danger of the man who is too assimilative, who 
possesses too perfectly the riches of tradition, is to 
feel that originality is henceforth impossible. It is 
related of a French critic that he used to turn away 


[ 229 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


wearily from every new volume of poetry that was 
submitted to him, with the remark : “ All the verses 
are written,” 

Genuine originality, however, is a hardy growth, 
and usually gains more than it loses by striking 
deep root into the literature of the past. La Bruy- 
ére begins his ‘“ Characters”’ by observing that 
“Everything has been said,’’ and then goes on to 
write. one of the most original books in French. 
Montaigne wrote a still more original book which 
often impresses the reader as a mere cento of quo- 
tations. An excessive respect for the past is less 
harmful than the excess from which we are now 
suffering. For example, one of our younger writers 
is praised in areview for his “stark freedom from 
tradition . .. as though he came into the world of let- 
ters without ever a predecessor. He is the expres- 
sion in literary art of certain enormous repudia- 
tions.”” It is precisely this notion of originality that 
explains the immense insignificance of so much of 
our contemporary writing. The man who breaks 
with the past in this way will think that he is origi- 
nal when he is in reality merely ignorant and pre- 
sumptuous. He is apt to imagine himself about a 


[ 230 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


century ahead of his age when he is at least four 
or five centuries behind it. “He comes to you,” 
as Bagehot puts it, “ with a notion that Noah dis- 
carded in the ark, and attracts attention to it as if 
it were a stupendous novelty of his own.” 

We may be sure that the more enlightened of the 
Cave Dwellers had already made deeper discoveries 
in human nature than many of our modern radicals. 
Goethe said that if as a young man he had known 
of the masterpieces that already existed in Greek 
he would never have written a line. Goethe carries 
his modesty too far; but how grateful just a touch 
of it would be in the average author of to-day! 
With even a small part of Goethe’s knowledge 
and insight, he would no longer go on serving up 
to us the dregs and last muddy lees of the ro- 
mantic and naturalistic movements as originality 
and genius. He would see that his very paradoxes 
were stale. Instead of being a half-baked author, 
he would become a modest and at the same time 
judicious reader; or, if he continued to write, he 
would be less anxious to create and more anxious to 
humanize his creations. Sooner or later every author, 

as well as the characters he conceives, will have to 


[ 231] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


answer the question that was the first addressed to 
any one who designed to enter the Buddhist church : 
« Are you a human being?” The world’s suffrage 
will go in the long run to the writer or artist who 
dwells habitually in the centre and not on the remote 
periphery of human nature. Gautier paid a doubt- 
ful compliment to Victor Hugo when he said that 
Hugo’s works seemed to proceed not from a man, 
but an element, that they were Cyclopean, “as it 
were, the works of Polyphemus.’”’ Hugo remained 
the original genius to the end, in contrast with 
Goethe, who attained humane restraint after having 
begun as a Rousseauist. 

Romanticism from the very beginning tended to 
become eccentric through over-anxiety to be origi- 
nal; and romanticism is now running to seed. Many 
of our contemporary writers are as plainly in an 
extreme as the most extreme of the neo-classicists. 
They think that to be original they need merely to 
arrive at self-expression without any effort to be 
representative. The neo-classicist, on the other hand, 
strove so hard to be representative that he often 
lost the personal flavor entirely and fell into color- 
less abstraction. Both extremes fail equally of being 


[ 232 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


humane. For, to revert to our fundamental principle, 
the humanist must combine opposite extremes and 
occupy all the space between them. Genuine origin- 
ality is so immensely difficult because it imposes 
the task of achieving work that is of general human 
truth and at the same time intensely individual. 
Perhaps the best examples of this union of qualities 
are found in Greek. The original man for the Greek 
was the one who could create in the very act of 
imitating the past. Greek literature at its best is to 
a remarkable degree a creative imitation of Homer. 

The modern does not, like the Greek, hope to 
become original by assimilating tradition, but rather 
by ignoring it, or, if he is a scholar, by trying to 
prove that it is mistaken. We have been discussing 
thus far almost entirely the originality of the Rous- 
seauist or sentimental naturalist ; but we should not 
fail to note the curious points of contact here as else- 
where between sentimental and scientific naturalism. 
The Baconian aims less at the assimilation of past 
wisdom than at the advancement of learning. With 
him too the prime stress is on the new and the 
original. Formerly there was a pedantry of authority 
and prescription. As a result of the working to- 


[233:] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


gether of Rousseauist and Baconian there has arisen 
a veritable pedantry of originality. The scientific 
pedant who is entirely absorbed in his own bit of 
research is first cousin to the artistic and literary 
pedant who is entirely absorbed in his own sensa- 
tion. The hero of modern scholarship is not the 
humanist, but the investigator. The man who digs 
up an unpublished document from some musty 
archive outranks the man who can deal judiciously 
with the documents already in print. His glory will 
be all the greater if he can make the new docu- 
ment a pretext for writing a book, for attempting 
a rehabilitation. The love of truth shades imper- 
ceptibly into the love of paradox; and Rousseau- 
ist and Baconian often coexist in the same person. 

A royal road to a reputation for originality is 
to impugn the verdicts of the past, —to whitewash 
what is traditionally black or to blackwash what 
is traditionally white. Only the other day one of 
the English reviews published the “Blackwashing 
of Dante.’ A still better example is Renan’s black- 
washing of King David, which concludes as follows : 
“Pious souls, when they take delight in the senti- 


ments filled with resignation and tender melancholy 


[ 234 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


contained in the most beautiful of the liturgical 
books, will imagine that they are in communion 
with this bandit. Humanity will believe in final 
justice on the testimony of David, who never gave 
it a thought, and of the Sibyl, who never existed,” 
etc. The whitewashings have been still more nu- 
merous. Rehabilitations have appeared of Tiberius, 
the Borgias, and Robespierre. A book has also 
been written to prove that the first Napoleon was 
a man of an eminently peace-loving disposition. 
Mr. Stephen Phillips undertakes to throw a poeti- 
cal glamour over the character of Nero, that ami- 
able youth, who, as the versifier in “ Punch’’ ob- 
serves, — 


*“ would have doubtless made his mark, 
Had he not, in a mad, mad, boyish lark, 
Murdered his mother!” 


If this whitewashing and blackwashing goes on, 
the time will soon come when the only way left to 
be original will be to make a modest plea for the 
traditional good sense of the world. This tradi- 
tional good sense was never treated with an easier 
contempt than at present. A writer named Bax, 
who recently published a volume rehabilitating the 


[ 235 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


revolutionary monster Marat, says in his preface: 
“Tt is in fact a fairly safe rule to ascertain for one- 
self what most people think on such questions ” 
(z. ¢. as the character of Marat), “‘and then assume 
the exact opposite to be true.” Of most books of 
this kind we may say what FitzGerald said when 
Henry Irving made himself up in the rdle of 
Shylock to look like the Saviour : “ It is an attempt 
to strike out an original idea in the teeth of common 


’ 


sense and tradition.’ Of course there are in every 
age and individual, as we have said elsewhere, ele- 
ments that run counter to the main tendency. One 
of the regular recipes for writing German doctors’ 
theses is to seize on one of these elements, exag- 
gerate it, and take it as a point of departure for 
refuting the traditional view. Thus Rousseau says 
in one place that he has always detested political 
agitators. We may be sure in advance that some 
German will start from this to prove that Rousseau 
has been cruelly maligned in being looked on asa 
revolutionist. 

Even our more serious scholars are finding it 
hard to resist that something in the spirit of the age 
which demands that their results be not only just, 


[ 236 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


but novel. Even our older universities are becoming 
familiar with the professor who combines in about 
equal measure his love of research and his love of 
the limelight. In public opinion, the perfection 
of the type is the Chicago professor whose original- 
ity has become the jest of the cheap newspapers. 
Here are a few Chicago “discoveries,” selected 
almost at random from the many that have been 
announced from time to time in the daily press : — 


Kissing causes lockjaw. 

The Pennsylvanians are turning into Indians. 

A man does not need to take exercise after the 
age of thirty-five. 

Music is antiseptic. 

A dog will not follow an uneducated man. 

Marriage is a form of insanity. 

Americans are incapable of friendship. 

Boccaccio was a Swede. 

John D. Rockefeller is as great a man as Shake- 
speare. 

Some day a wounded or even worn-out heart of 
a human being may be replaced by a pea heart 
from a living monkey, etc. 


[ 237 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


The Chicago professors would say, and no doubt 
rightly, that they are misrepresented by these news- 
paper statements.’ But we are only giving the gen- 
eral impression. Even the utterance of Dr. Osler 
that at once gave him such a start over all his aca- 
demic rivals in the race for notoriety becomes com- 
paratively unsensational when read in its context. 
The professor with an itch for the limelight has 
only to pattern himself on Rousseau, the great mas- 
ter of paradox. Rousseau’s ‘method has been com- 
pared to that of a man who fires off a pistol in the 
street to attract a crowd. When Rousseau has once 
drawn his crowd, he may proceed to attenuate his 
paradox, until sometimes it is in danger of dwin- 
dling into a commonplace. 

Most good observers would probably agree that 
contemporary scholarship and literature are becom- 
ing too eccentric and centrifugal ; they would agree 
that some unifying principle is needed to counteract 
this excessive striving after originality. For exam- 
ple, Professor Gummere, who is one of the most 
distinguished representatives of the scholarly tradi- 


* Chicago instructors have told me that the University is the 


victim of a sort of conspiracy on the part of certain newspapers. 


[238] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


tion that ultimately goes back to Herder and the 
Grimm brothers, diagnoses our present malady with 
great clearness in a recent article on “ Originality 
and Convention in Literature.” * The higher forms 
of poetry and creative art, he says, are being made 
impossible by the disintegrating influences at work 
in modern life, and by an excess of analysis. He 
suggests as remedy that we jettison this intellectual 
and analytical element, and seek to restore once 
more the bond of communal sympathy. This remedy 
betrays at once its romantic origin. It is only one 
form of Rousseau’s assumption that an unaided 
sympathy will do more to draw men together than 
the naked forces of egoism and self-assertion will 
do to drive them asunder. Even in his studies of 
the beginnings of poetry Professor Gummere should, 
perhaps, have insisted more on communal discipline 
as a needful preliminary to communal sympathy. 
However that may be, our present hope does not 
seem to lie in the romanticist’s attempt to revert to 
the unity of instinct and feeling that he supposes 
to have existed in primitive life. We need to com- 
mune and unite in what is above rather than in what 


* Quarterly Review, January, 1906. 


[ 239 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


is below our ordinary selves, and the pathway to this 
higher unity is not through sympathy, communal 
or otherwise, but through restraint. If we have got 
so far apart, it is because of the lack, not of sym- 
pathy, but of humane standards. 

Without trying to enter fully into so large a topic 
as the impressionism of our modern society, its loss 
of traditional standards, and its failure as yet to find 
new, we may at least point out that education should 
be less infected than it is with a pedantic straining 
after originality. In general, education should repre- 
sent the conservative and unifying element in our 
national life. The college especially must maintain 
humane standards, if it is to have any reason at all 
for existing as something distinct from university 
and preparatory school. Its function is not, as is so 
often assumed, merely to help its students to self- 
expression, but even more to help them to become 
humane. In the words of Cardinal Newman, the 
college is ‘‘the great ordinary means to a great 
but ordinary end ;’’ this end is to supply principles 
of taste and judgment and train in sanity and cen- 
trality of view ; to give background and perspective, 
and inspire, if not the spirit of conformity, at least a 


[ 240 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


proper respect for the past experience of the world. 
Most of us have heard of Mrs. Shelley’s reply when 
advised to send her boy to a school where he would 
be taught to think for himself: “My God! teach 
him rather to think like other people.” Mrs. Shelley 
had lived with a man who was not only a real genius, 
but also an original genius in the German sense, and 
knew whereof she spoke. Now the college should 
not necessarily teach its students to think like other 
people, but it should teach them to distinguish be- 
tween what is original and what is merely odd and 
eccentric, both in themselves and others. According 
to Lowell, this is a distinction that Wordsworth 
could never make, and Wordsworth is not alone in 
this respect among the romantic leaders. We must 
insist, at the risk of causing scandal, that the college 
is not primarily intended to encourage originality 
and independence of thought as these terms are 
often understood. The story is told of a professor 
in one of our Eastern colleges that he invariably 
gave a high mark to the undergraduates who contra- 
dicted the received opinions in his subject ; but the 
highest mark he reserved for the undergraduate who 
in addition to contradicting the traditional view set 


[ 241 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


up a new view of his own. As this fact became 
known, the professor was gratified by a rapid growth 
among his students of independent and original 
thinking. 

The college should guard against an undue stress 
on self-expression and an insufficient stress on hu- 
mane assimilation. This danger is especially plain 
in the teaching of English composition. A father 
once said to me of a “daily theme” course that it 
had at least set his son’s wits to working. But what 
if it set them to working in the void? The most 
that can be expected of youths who are put to writ- 
ing with little or no background of humane assimila- 
tion is a clever impressionism. They will be fitted, 
not to render serious service to literature, but at 
most to shine in the more superficial kinds of jour- 
nalism, It is still an open question whether any 
direct method of teaching English really takes the 
place of the drill in the niceties of style that can be 
derived from translation, especially the translation 
of Latin; whether a student, for example, who ren- 
dered Cicero with due regard for the delicate shades 
of meaning would not gain more mastery of English 
(to say nothing of Latin) than a student who de- 


[ 242 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


voted the same amount of time to daily themes and 
original composition. We must, however, be fair to 
our departments of English. They have to cope 
with conditions not entirely of their own making, of 
which the most serious is something approaching 
illiteracy in many of the students that are forced 
upon them from the preparatory schools. In practice 
they have to devote most of their time to imparting, 
not the elegancies, but the simplest decencies of the 
English language. Ultimately a great deal of what 
goes on in the more elementary college courses in 
English may well be relegated to the lower schools, 
—and the home, —and the work that is done in 
the advanced courses in composition will probably 
either be omitted entirely, or else done, as it is in 
France, in connection with the reading and detailed 
study of great writers. Assimilation will then keep 
pace as it should with expression. 

Spinoza says that a man should constantly keep 
before his eyes a sort of exemplar of human nature 
(idea hominis, tamquam nature humane exemplar). 
He should, in other words, have a humane standard 
to which he may defer, and which will not proscribe 
originality, but will help him to discriminate be- 


[ 243 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


tween what is original and what is merely freakish 
and abnormal in himself and others. Now this 
humane standard may be gained bya few through 
philosophic insight, but in most cases it will be 
attained, if at all, by a knowledge of good literature 
— by a familiarity with that golden chain of master- 
pieces which links together into a single tradition 
the more permanent experience of the race; books 
which so agree in essentials that they seem, as 
Emerson puts it, to be the work of one all-seeing, 
all-hearing gentleman. In short, the most practical 
way of promoting humanism is to work for a revival 
of the almost lost art of reading. As a general rule, 
the humane man will be the one who has a memory 
richly stored with what is best in literature, with 
the sound sense perfectly expressed that is found 
only in the masters. Conversely, the decline of 
humanism and the growth of Rousseauism has been 
marked by a steady decay in the higher uses of the 
memory. For the Greeks the Muses were not the 
daughters of Inspiration or of Genius, as they would 
be for a modern, but the daughters of Memory. 
Sainte-Beuve says that “from time to time we 
should raise our eyes to the hill-tops, to the group 


[ 244 ] 


ON BEING ORIGINAL 


of revered mortals, and ask ourselves: What would 
they say of us?” No one whose memory is not 
enriched in the way we have described can profit 
by this advice. Sainte-Beuve himself in giving it 
was probably only remembering Longinus.' 


1 See Ox the Sublime, section xiv. 


IX 
ACADEMIC LEISURE 


UNDER present conditions there is almost a touch 
of irony in associating the words “academic” and 
“leisure.’’ A prominent physician has said that the 
two classes of persons most subject to nervous 
breakdown are Wall Street speculators and college 
professors. Nervous breakdown, as is well known, 
draws its victims both from those who have too 
much and those who have not enough to do; and 
the business man would no doubt add that the col- 
lege teacher belongs among the latter. In spite of 
the gibe of the business man, however, the college 
teacher not only has enough and more than enough 
to do, but his work would seem to involve an unusual 
degree of strain and high pressure. At the present 
rate a college will soon come to suggest not the 
“quiet and still air of delightful studies,” but a 
place from which one needs to retire occasionally 
to recuperate in a sanitarium. With the increase of 


Baconian strenuousness there has come into exist- 
[ 240 ] 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


ence that strangest of all anomalies, the hustling 
scholar, — that is, if we render “ scholar” according 
to its Greek derivation, the hustling man of leisure. 

A great deal of the hustling that is either encour- 
aged or imposed in academic circles is unintelligent, 
even from a strictly Baconian standpoint. For if it 
is not important in the eyes of the Baconian that a 
man should have time to meditate, it is important 
that he should have time to do his own work to the 
best advantage. In Europe, for example,a man who 
is deemed capable of productive scholarship is not 
usually expected to spend more than three hours 
a week in lecturing. In this country the productive 
scholar often has to teach or lecture from nine to 
eighteen hours a week ; in addition he is likely to be 
burdened with administrative duties, not to speak 
of the pot-boiling devices to which he sometimes 
resorts to eke out an insufficient salary. This state 
of affairs is contrary not only to sound Baconian 
principles, but to common sense, and will no doubt 
gradually be remedied. 

The problem of relieving our scholars of unneces- 
sary drudgery is one that touches the problem of 
leisure at a number of points, but is entirely distinct 


[ 247] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


from it at others. We can imagine a company of 
productive scholars, each distinguished in his own 
subject and free to pursue it, and yet among them 
all not a single man of leisure. When the scholar of 
to-day complains of lack of leisure he nearly always 
means lack of time todo his own work. This failure 
to attach any further meaning to the word leisure 
simply expresses the change that has taken place 
in our whole conception of scholarship. Formerly 
the scholar was esteemed not so much for what he 
did as for what he was. In the words of Ecclesi- 
asticus : ‘The wisdom of a learned man cometh by 
opportunity of leisure, and he that hath little busi- 
ness shall become wise.’’ The Baconian tendency, 
on the other hand, is to measure the scholar’s 
achievement almost entirely in terms of work. For 
example, President Harper, in an address delivered 
a short time before his death, enumerated what he 
conceived to be the qualifications of the perfect 
professor, and ended by saying that “he should be 
willing to work hard eleven months in the year.” 
There is something in these words that reminds one 
involuntarily of the late Russell Sage and his 
celebrated article on the “Injustice of Vacations” 


[ 248 ] 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


(with portrait of the author at the age of eighty- 
eight in the benign attitude of leaning over a stock- 
ticker). One is also reminded, by way of contrast, of 
a saying of Aristotle’s : “ We work in order that we 
may have leisure.”’ If President Harper’s model pro- 
fessor ever snatches a brief interval from his fierce 
activity, it is evidently not that he may have leisure, 
but merely that he may recuperate (in a sani- 
tarium or elsewhere), and prepare for fresh labor. 
The hero of the hour is not the man of leisure, 
but the man who engages in what may be termed 
humanitarian hustling. It has been taken as self- 
evident for some time that the college president ' 


* The comic papers, however, are beginning to have their 
doubts. Here are two samples from a list of College Presidents, 
New Style, in a recent number of Zi/e : — 

“Philander Boggs, D. D., President of the University of Ar- 
kana, has just received the degree LL. D. from Yarvard. Presi- 
dent Boggs, by his recent action in raising $250,000 in three weeks, 
has well merited this honor, and at the same time has placed his 


institution among the foremost of the land. 


When that sterling educator, Boxall Webster, took charge of 
the Hilldale Seminary, there was scarcely a dollar in the treasury. 
Now there are five new buildings, and bequests have been stream- 
ing in so fast that it has been necessary to buy a new safe. Presi- 


dent Webster is undoubtedly a leader in modern thought,” etc. 


[ 249 ] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


and the minister of the gospel should chiefly dis- 
tinguish themselves in this way, and of late we are 
beginning to hear the still stranger doctrine that the 
judge on the bench should also be a humanitarian 
hustler. 

It is no ordinary phenomenon, — this universal 
glorification of work, not only by business men 
like Russell Sage, but by college presidents, who 
stand traditionally for the idea of leisure. ‘* The joy 
in work,” says President Eliot, “is the chief hope 
of an industrial democracy.’’ Once more one is re- 
minded of Aristotle, and his conclusion that the high- 
est good is not the joy in work, but the joy in con- 
templation. Aristotle, it should be remembered, in 
his praises of leisure and the contemplative life does 
not speak as a quietist or mystic, but as the inter- 
preter of what is ripest in Greek, and, we are tempted 
to add, in all culture. Mr. Bosanquet excellently 
' says: ‘ Leisure — the word from which our word 
‘school’ is derived — was for the Greek the expres- 
sion of the highest moments of the mind. It was 
not labor; far less was it recreation. It was that 
employment of the mind in which by great thoughts, 
by art and poetry which lift us above ourselves, by 


[ 250 ] 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


the highest exertion of the intelligence, as we should 
add, by religion, we obtain occasionally a sense of 
‘something that cannot be taken from us, a real one- 
ness and centre in the universe; and which makes 
us feel that whatever happens to the present form of 
our little ephemeral personality, life is yet worth 
living because it has a real and sensible contact 
with something of eternal value.” 

Some tradition of this scholarly leisure still lin- 
gers along with the old humanism in the English 
universities. But even at Oxford and Cambridge, 
and still more in our own college faculties, the hu- 
manist and man of leisure is being elbowed aside by 
the scientific specialist and the bustling humanita- 
rian. The view of life that tends to prevail excludes 
the idea of repose. It looks upon man, not as hav- 
ing his goal in himself, but as an instrument for the 
attainment of certain outer ends; it therefore dis- 
regards the ways in which the activity and proper 
perfection of a human being differ from the activity 
and proper perfection of an instrument or machine ; 
it neglects, in a word, all that the Greek epitomized 
in his idea of leisure, and sets up instead the wor- 


ship of energy and mechanical efficiency. “ The 


[ 251] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


stress and rush of life seems greater to-day in 
America than it ever was before,” says Mr. Bryce. 
“‘ Everybody, from the workman to the millionaire, 
has a larger head of steam on than his father had.” 
Man, as Mr. Bryce’s metaphor suggests, is judged 
by much the same standard as a locomotive, and is 
considered inactive unless the wheels are visibly 
turning. Now, just as it has been found good econ- 
omy when a locomotive begins to show signs of 
wear to consign it to the scrap heap and substitute a 
new one, so there is a tendency to prefer to even 
a middle-aged man a young man whose vital ma- 
chinery is still unimpaired. There are not lacking 
academic Baconians, like Dr. Osler, who are ready 
to give a sort of scientific sanction to this drift to- 
ward a brutal naturalism in the world of business. 
After large deductions are made for humorous 
exaggeration, Dr. Osler’s utterances still remain a 
curious example of the way in which certain minds 
are reverting, under guise of scientific progress, to 
the ethics of the Stone Age. 

Bacon himself would, no doubt, disapprove of 
much of our modern strenuousness. Yet the con- 
nection is plain between even the more exaggerated 


[ 252] 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


forms of this strenuousness and Bacon’s exaltation 
of the active over the contemplative life. Up to the 
time of Bacon there had been a fairly consistent 
tradition in the world that the highest good is at- 
tained, not by action, but by meditation. In this 
one point, at least, Orient and Occident, Greek and 
Christian, Mohammedan and Buddhist and Hindu, 
were agreed. Faith in the benefits of an undis- 
turbed meditation led to the founding of innumer- 
able monasteries. Medizeval theology appropriated 
Aristotle’s doctrine of leisure, and used it to give 
additional sanction to the Christian doctrine that 
exalted the wisdom of Mary above the wisdom of 
Martha, and saw in the attainment of beatific vision 
the crown and fulfillment of the religious life. And 
so Bacon’s attack on Aristotle and his conception 
of leisure was at once felt to imply an attack on 
one of the central tenets of traditional belief. The 
Baconian reaction against the contemplative life 
was aided by the discontent that had been growing 
for centuries with certain aspects of the organized 
attempts to encourage this life. Men have always 
felt the necessity of leisure and contemplation ; and 
yet their efforts to promote what they assumed to 


[ 253 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


be the highest good have often seemed to promote 
almost equally what is certainly one of the great- 
est of evils, — indolence (corruptio optimt pessima). 
For example, in theory the monastery was a place 
where the sage and saint were to use their release 
from secular affairs to engage in austere medita- 
tions. The reality was only too often the lazy friar, 
who, as Voltaire puts it, ‘had made a vow to God 
to live at our expense.’ Again, universities like 
Oxford and Cambridge were intended to be the 
homes of learned leisure. Instead, Oxford became 
the home of port and prejudice that Gibbon has 
described ; and another eighteenth-century observer 
saw in Cambridge merely a place where a man 
might perfect himself in the art of lounging.* 
Lowell was in favor of establishing a few “ lazy- 
ships’’ at Harvard, but the phrase is obviously 
unfortunate, since it obscures the all-important 
distinction between idleness and leisure. 

The idea of leisure, then, has suffered not only 
from the progress of Baconian principles, but from 
the unworthiness of many of those who have 


claimed to represent it. It has also suffered during 
? See Spectator, No. 54. 
[ 254 | 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


the past hundred years or more from the influence 
of Rousseau and the Rousseauists. On either side 
of the entrance to the reading-room of the new Sor- 
bonne at Paris are mural paintings of two female 
figures: one, of strenuous aspect, and with con- 
tracted brow, is entitled Science; the other, in float- 
ing draperies, and with vague, far-away eye, is entitled 
Réve. The scientific analyst and romantic dreamer 
who are symbolized in this way have divided be- 
tween them the nineteenth century, and in their 
very opposition have been hostile to leisure. If the 
Baconian denies leisure entirely as something dis- 
tinct from rest or relaxation, the Rousseauist con- 
verts leisure into revery. He tends to efface the line 
between thinking and dreaming. He fails to feel 
sufficiently the difference between the “ sessions of 
sweet silent thought” and a “ wise passiveness.”’ 
He is unwilling or unable, as Thiers said was the 
case with Louis Napoleon, to distinguish between 
the verbs réver and réféchir. Revery,as Sainte- 
Beuve remarks, was Rousseau’s great discovery, his 
America (son Amérique a@ luz). The charms of plain 
loafing have been thoroughly appreciated since the 
beginning of the world. But in his practice of ‘le 


[255] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


réve” Rousseau attained toa sort of transcendental 
loafing — he invited his soul to loaf. He is the first 
of a long series of zsthetic vagabonds who have 
found solace in a world of luxurious dreams, and 
often sought refuge in this world from a reality 
disenchanted by scientific analysis. This confusing 
of the contemplative life with revery is doubtless 
destined to become a matter of curious study when 
we see the romantic movement more from the out- 
side and are less inclined than we are at present to 
take the romantic leaders at their own estimate of 
themselves. “I am in no wise tempted by the active 
life,” says Rousseau, and thus far he speaks like 
some sage or eremite ; but as we read on we discover 
that he was the kind of hermit who, as Byron puts 
it, would have liked a “ harem for a grot,” and who 
entertained his solitude with the very images that St. 
Anthony sought to escape by leaping into the snow. 

The confusion between revery and leisure is still 
more flagrant in Friedrich Schlegel’s extraordinary 
Elegy on Idleness: ‘‘O idleness, idleness! thou art 
the native element of innocence and poetry;... 
blessed the mortals who cherish thee, thou sacred 
gem, sole fragment of godlike being that is left 


[ 256] 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


to us from paradise. . . . Why are the gods gods 
if not because they consciously and purposely do 
nothing, because they understand this art and are 
masters in it? And oh, how the poets, the sages 
and saints are endeavoring to become like the gods 
in this respect! How they vie with each other in 
the praise of solitude, leisure, and a liberal careless- 
ness and inactivity! . . . Through composure and 
gentleness only, in the sacred quietude of genuine 
passiveness, can we realize our whole self... . The 
right of idleness marks the distinction between the 
noble and the common, and is the true essence of 
aristocracy. To say it in a word: The more divine 
man is, the more fully does he resemble the plant.” ! 

Revery is variously modified not only by indi- 
vidual but by national temperament. If it is volup- 
tuous in Rousseau, and sentimental and pedantic in 
the Germans, in an Englishman like Wordsworth 
it tends to become austere and ethical. Wordsworth 
seeks to bestow moral seriousness and dignity on 
what is at bottom only a delicious epicureanism, a 


rapturous mingling of soul and sense. For example, 


1 Lucinde, in which the Elegy on Idleness appears, was pud- 


lished in 1799. 
[257] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


Peter Bell ‘had a dozen wedded wives,” and had 
committed other heinous offenses against God and 
man (the most heinous, of course, being his failure 
to transcendentalize ‘‘a primrose by a river’s brim”’). 
All might have been different with Peter Bell if he 
had only felt the “ witchery of the soft blue sky.” 

We do not mean to make an indiscriminate attack 
on romantic revery. The humanist will not deny the 
uses of a “wise passiveness ;”’ he will simply deny 
that a wise passiveness is a sufficient substitute for 
leisure. He will be grateful for those new faculties 
with which, according to his admirers, Rousseau 
enriched the human soul, though he will always regret 
that what is sound and valuable in Rousseau’s mes- 
sage should be mixed up with so much that is mor- 
bid and pathological. The humanist will grant freely 
the good of Rousseauism in its proper place, but of 
Rousseauism out of its place he will say, with a 
recent French writer, that it is an “ integral corrup- 
tion of the higher parts of human nature.’’! 


In general the humanist will not repudiate either 


* See P. Lasserre, Le romantisme francais (1907), p. 70. Las- 
serre’s book is a keen analysis and arraignment of the French 


romantic movement, but is weak on the constructive side. 


[ 258] 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


sentimental or scientific naturalism ; for this would 
be to attempt an impossible reaction. His aim is not 
to deny his age, but to complete it. Various modern 
tendencies have been freely criticised throughout 


these essays, especially the tendency to make utopian ~ 


appeals to the principle of brotherhood when what 
is wanted is a submission to the discipline of com- 
mon sense and humane standards. But because some 
sobering off is desirable after what one is tempted 
to call the romantic and naturalistic debauch of the 
nineteenth century, it does not follow that we 
should return to the point of view of the eighteenth 
century (though a greater respect for an eight- 
eenth-century writer like Dr. Johnson, as compared 
with certain romanticists, would not be a bad symp- 
tom). The great expansion of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, its fullness of knowledge and sympathy, are 
excellent ; but only in so far as they prepare the way 
for a juster judgment and a richer selection. Know- 
ledge and sympathy alone will work out into iron- 
ical contradictions of themselves,’ and at the same 
time prove impotent to save us from anarchy and 
impressionism. The pathway to the new synthesis 


- Cf. pp. 42, 43. 
[259] 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


that we need is not through the strenuousness of the 
Baconian ; nor can we hope to escape the Baconian 
one-sidedness by resorting to the revery of the 
Rousseauist. The fruitful opposite of strenuous- 
ness is not revery, but leisure and reflection. 

Plato, who, as Emerson remarks, makes sad havoc 
with our originalities, has discussed this whole ques- 
tion of the strenuous life toward the end of his 
dialogue called “The Statesman.” * There are two 
types of character, according to Plato, each admir- 
able in its own way; one of these may be described 
in terms expressive of motion or energy, and the 
other in terms expressive of rest and quietness. Of 
the first we say, how manly! how vigorous! how 
ready! And of the second, how calm! how temper- 
ate! how dignified! The greatest triumph of state- 
craft is to see that the balance is maintained between 
these two types, and that neither unduly predomi- 
nates. For strenuousness, when it gains excess- 
ive mastery, “may at first bloom and strengthen, 
but at last bursts forth into downright madness,” 
and is especially likely, Plato adds elsewhere, to 


involve a state in wars with all its neighbors. On 


™ See Jowett’s Plato, iv, p. 429 and pp. 517, 518. 
[ 260 | 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


the other hand, “the strenuous character, inferior 
though it be to the temperate type in justice and 
caution, has the power of action in a remarkable 
degree, and where either of these two types is 
wanting, there cities cannot altogether prosper 
either in their public or in their private life.”” There- 
fore Plato imagines a perfect statesman, a sort of 
deus ex machina, whose business it is to weave 
together the strenuous and the temperate charac- 
ters as the warp and woof of the perfect state. 
Some of the duties that Plato assigns to his ideal 
ruler would seem to belong in our own day to the 
higher institutions of learning. Our colleges and 
universities could render no greater service than to 
oppose to the worship of energy and the frantic 
eagerness for action an atmosphere of leisure and 
reflection. It would seem that they might recognize 
the claims of the contemplative life without en- , 
couraging a cloistered seclusion or falling into the 
monastic abuses of the past. We should make large 
allowance in our lives for the “eventual element of | 
calm,” if they are not to degenerate into the furious 
and feverish pursuit of mechanical efficiency. The 
industrial democracy of which President Eliot speaks 


[ 261 | 


LITERATURE AND THE COLLEGE 


will need to temper its joy in work with the joy in 
leisure, if it is to be a democracy in whieh a civilized 
person would care to live. The tendency of an 
industrial democracy that took joy in work alone 
would be to live in a perpetual devil’s sabbath of 
whirling machinery, and call it progress. Progress, 
thus understood, will prove only a way of retrograd- 
ing toward barbarism. It is well to attain to the 
secret of power, but not at the sacrifice of the secret 
of peace. What is wanted is neither Oriental quiet- 
ism, nor again the inhuman strenuousness of a 
certain type of Occidental; neither pure action nor 
pure repose, but a blending of the two that will 
occupy all the space between them, — that activity 
in repose which -has been defined as the human- 
istic ideal. The serious advantage of our modern 
machinery is that it lightens the drudgery of the 
world and opens up the opportunities of leisure to 
more people than has hitherto been possible. We 
should not allow ourselves to be persuaded that the 
purpose of this machinery is merely to serve as point 
of departure for a still intenser activity. The present 
situation especially is not one that will be saved — 
if it is to be saved at all — by what we have called 
[ 262 | 


ACADEMIC LEISURE 


humanitarian hustling. We have already quoted the 
federal judge who exhorts the American people to 
combine ten per cent of thought with ninety per cent 
of action. If we ourselves ventured on an exhorta- 
tion to the American people, it would rather be that 
of Demosthenes to the Athenians: “In God’s 
name, I beg of you to think.” Of action we shall 
have plenty in any case; but it is only by a more 
humane reflection that we can escape the penalties 
sure to be exacted from any country that tries to 
dispense in its national life with the principle of 
leisure. 














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